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Do we really know what implicit bias is, and whether we have it? This is the second episode on our two-part series on implicit bias; the first part was an interview with Dr. Mahzarin Banaji, former Dean of the Department of Psychology at Harvard University, and co-creator of the Implicit Association Test. But the body of research on this topic is large and quite complicated, and I couldn't possibly do it justice in one episode.  There are a number of criticisms of the test which are worth examining, so we can get a better sense for whether implicit bias is really something we should be spending our time thinking about - or if our problems with explicit bias are big enough that we would do better to focus there first. Jump to highlights: (03:38) Is implicit bias baked into our bodies? (06:27) About the Implicit Association Test (IAT) (08:13) Criticism of the IAT and Dr. Banaji’s response (12:48) Blindspot and the inception of the IAT (13:41) We make judgements about individuals based on how they look (14:12) We often say things that aren't true, even if we think we are truthful (16:01) The premise of the IAT and how it works (18:13) Conflicting definition of what implicit bias is (19:40) Meta-analysis of implicit bias (33:16) Implicit bias on the decline in recent years (35:37) The persistent problem with IAT (42:59) From macro-issues to the micro-issues of IAT (53:54) My takeways Resources: Implicit Association Test [accordion] [accordion-item title="Click here to read the full transcript"] Jen  00:02 Hi, I'm Jen and I host the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. We all want her children to lead fulfilling lives but it can be so hard to keep up with the latest scientific research on child development and figure out whether and how to incorporate it into our own approach to parenting. Here at Your Parenting Mojo, I do the work for you by critically examining strategies and tools related to parenting and child development that are grounded in scientific research and principles of Respectful Parenting. If you'd like to be notified when new episodes are released, and get a FREE Guide called 13 Reasons Why Your Child Won't Listen To You and What To Do About Each One, just head over to YourParentingMojo.com/SUBSCRIBE. You can also continue the conversation about the show with other listeners in the Your Parenting Mojo Facebook group. I do hope you'll join us.   Jen  00:59 Hello, and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. Before we start this week's episode, I wanted to take a minute to thank you for being a part of this parenting journey with me and to share a quick update on where things stand with the podcast after four and a half years now. What is that saying? The days are long and the years are short? It certainly seems to be the case here. And well for some of you listening, this may be the very first episode that you're listening to, there are many others who have been with me for the entire 132 plus episodes that I've created to date. We're close to surpassing a million and a half downloads from all around the world, and my goodness, it's a bit strange to even say those words aloud given that I started the show with basically no idea whether anyone would be interested in listening. And it's such an honor to me when you recommend the show to your friends and to other parents at your daycare or preschool. When you share specific episodes that have helped you to find the answers that work with your family and your online communities. And I'm not exaggerating when I say that developing Your Parenting Mojo, which is now the podcast episodes, blog posts, courses, workshops, membership content is more than a full-time job. I have a very small team that helps me to keep my own sanity and my husband is now involved as well. Maybe one day he'll even listen to as many episodes as some of my most dedicated listeners have. Even my daughter now signs off on her videos at home with the brought to you by YourParentingMojo.com. And as the word continues to spread, more and more parents are making transformative lasting change using the methods that we talked about here on the show. We are big cohort in the current Taming Your Triggers workshop who are supporting each other and understanding the sources of their triggered feelings. And just a week or two in they were already reporting the ability to create space for responses to their children that fit with their values, where that just hadn't seemed possible before. And I'm very happy to share that the Parenting Membership open enrollment is just around the corner and will run from May 2 through May 12 in time for celebrating Mother's Day, while the learning membership is going to reopen later in the summer. The community of parents that have already enrolled in the Parenting Membership continues to grow and it's a great resource of knowledge and support and community to help anyone who's looking to apply the ideas and strategies that you hear on the podcast in your own family at home. So I'll share more as we get closer to open enrollment. But for those of you who want to learn more or to join the waitlist, feel free to go to YourParentingMojo.com/ParentingMembership. And thanks again to each and every one of you who have joined me on this parenting journey over the last four and a half years. I learn and I grow every day as a parent and it's amazing to share all this with you.   Jen  03:38 So let's get into our real topic of the day, which is part two of our miniseries on implicit bias. Today we're going to continue to open a real can of worms that's already half opened, and that I had no idea that I was about to open when I started researching this episode. So I've been interested in the connection between the brain and the body for some time now, and I'm planning a series of episodes to explore this topic in some depth. And one aspect of this is related to knowledge that we hold in our bodies rather than in our brains. And as I started to explore that idea, I was thinking about intuition, which we often experience as a felt sense in our bodies rather than a decision that we make in our brains. And that led me down a path toward understanding the role our gut plays in what we know. But another branch of this path led me to the topic of implicit bias because I was thinking, Okay, if we start relying on our brains a bit less and trusting our bodies a bit more, how can we know that this will lead us in a direction that's actually aligned with our values? What if implicit bias means that listening to our bodies actually takes us away from living our values because our bodies have implicit bias baked in so deeply?   Jen  04:43 Now I've read the book Blind Spot: The Hidden Biases of Good People by doctors Mahzarin Banaji and Anthony Greenwald some years ago, but I hadn't dug into the research behind it at the time. The book's premise is that we have visual blind spots, which are places where visual information is missing, but our brains fill in the gaps without us realizing it, which can be seen when a person whose visual cortex has been damaged and they can't see an object like a hammer in front of them, but if you ask them to reach out and grasp it, then they'll be able to do it. The author state that a parallel idea exists with non-visual stimuli as well, they say and I'm going to quote "Rather than an effective visual perception, this book focuses on another type of blind spot, one that contains a large set of biases and keeps them hidden just as patients who can't see a hammer can still act as if they do. Hidden biases are capable of guiding our behavior without our being aware of their role. What are the hidden biases of this book's title? They are for lack of a better term bits of knowledge about social groups. These bits of knowledge are stored in our brains because we encounter them so frequently in our cultural environments. Once lodged in our minds, hidden biases can influence our behavior towards members of particular social groups, but we remain oblivious to their influence. In this book, we aim to make clear why many scientists ourselves very much included, now recognize hidden bias blind spots as fully believable because of the sheer weight of scientific evidence that demands this conclusion. But convincing readers of this is no simple challenge. How can we show the existence of something in our own minds of which we remain completely unaware?" The book goes on to describe a test called the Implicit Association Test, or IAT, which was designed by Dr. Greenwald and modified by both authors over the years, starting when Dr. Banaji was Dr. Greenwald’s graduate student.   Jen  06:27 And so I'd known about what is the Race IAT  for a number of years, there are actually now quite a few of them on topics ranging from age to religion to body weight. The landing page at implicit.harvard.edu, which is where these tests are housed, doesn't say much about the purpose of these tests. You have to click into the About the IAT page to see the description that "The IAT measures the strength of associations between concepts, for example, Black people, gay people, and evaluations, for example, good and bad, or stereotypes, for example, athletic or clumsy. The main idea is that making your responses easier when closely related items share the same response key, the IAT scores based on how long it takes a person on average, to sort the words in the third part of the IAT versus the fifth part of the IAT. We would say that one has an implicit preference for thin people relative to fat people if they are faster to categorize words, when thin people and good share a response key, and fat people and bad share a response key relative to the reverse."   Jen  07:25 I think I’d even taken the Race IAT once before, a long time ago, which is the version of the test that most people assume you’re talking about when you mention the IAT.  I don’t remember for sure what the result was but I assume it gave the result that it gives about 75% of people who take it, which is to say that they have implicit bias against Black people.   Jen  07:44 I came back to the book again and poked around on both Dr. Banaji’s and Dr. Greenwald’s websites to see what they had been up to recently.  I noticed that the most recent publication on Dr. Banaji’s website was co-authored with Dr. Yarrow Dunham, whom we met way back in episode 28 on how social groups form, which is linked to implicit bias.  I emailed him and asked if he would be kind enough to introduce me to Dr. Banaji, which he was, and she quickly responded to say that while she was too swamped for an interview she’d be happy to answer three or four questions.  So: so far, so good.   Jen  08:13 Now, Pretty often when I reach out to researchers I’ve been able to get an overview of the concept and of their work but I haven’t yet done a deep dive, because if they say ‘no’ then I will have wasted several days of prep work as I’d have to find someone else to ask and then have to do a deep dive into *their* work.  So after Dr. Banaji agreed to answer some questions I reread Blindspot, and thirty peer-reviewed papers on implicit bias, and some really well-written articles in the popular press (and some not so well-written ones as well), and then things got a bit difficult.  I want to give a special shout-out to journalist Jesse Singal, who wrote a really excellent piece on the topic of the research behind the IAT in an online magazine called The Cut.  I had it open in my browser for a while as I was digging into the peer-reviewed literature and when I finally came back to it I found he had already coalesced a number of the thoughts that were swirling in my brain and had pointed to many of the studies I had by then found “by myself,” and directed me to a few more besides.  He also reached out to a number of the researchers who have been involved in quite a drama of dueling analyses about the IAT which has played out in peer reviewed journals over the last decade or so (dramas in the peer reviewed journal world tend to unfold in slow motion!).  It’s been a drama because there seems to be a great deal of uncertainty about whether the IAT measures what it says it measures, and whether that has any practical significance in the real world.   I ended up actually writing the majority of this episode’s content to try to explain to myself what this web of findings was, and I sent the text to Dr. Banaji along with some succinct questions and she responded that she had never met an interviewer who had done more in-depth preparation and would I like to talk?  So I said yes, I very much would, and you’ve already heard the outcome of that interview in a recent episode, where hopefully you got a good grounding in what the IAT is and how it works.   Jen  09:56 And we'll cover a bit more on that in a few minutes. But I have to say that I was highly hesitant to try to do anything that looked remotely like challenging the research on which the IAT sits because of something that appeared toward the end of Jessie Singal’s article in The Cut.  He emailed Dr. Banaji with some questions about the kinds of methodological questions about the IAT that we’re going to look at in this episode, and he says she “repeatedly asserted that criticisms of the IAT come from a small group of reactionary researchers, and that questioning the IAT is not something normal, well-adjusted people do.”   Jen  10:30 He goes on to quote her directly: “Of course it annoys people when a simple test that spits out two numbers produces this sort of attention, changes scientific practice, and appeals to ordinary people. Ordinary people who are not scared to know what may be in their minds. It scares people (fortunately a negligible minority) that learning about our minds may lead people to change their behavior so that their behavior may be more in line with their ideals and aspirations. The IAT scares people who say things like “look, the water fountains are desegregated, what’s your problem.”   Jen  11:01 […]   Jen  11:01 By and large I operate on the view that I need to pay attention to REAL criticisms of the IAT. Criticisms that come from people who are experts – that is[,] people who understand the science’s assumptions about response latency measures. People who do original work using such methods. I’m sorry to say this but we are all so far along in our work that I at least only read criticisms from people who are experts. I don’t read commentaries from non-experts. There’s too much interesting stuff to do and too many amazing people doing it for me to justify worrying about a small group of aggrieved individuals who think that Black people have it easy in American society and that the IAT work might make their lives easier. The IAT as you know is not about any one group, but this small group of critics ignore everything other than race, and it may be a good idea to find out why that may be the case.”   Jen  11:47 Now, if you've been listening for a while, I’m sure you can see the red flags going off in my conflict-avoiding mind already – I’m not an expert; I don’t do original work in this area, and thus she wouldn’t read any commentary or criticism that I proposed, which is why I didn’t get into any of this in the conversation with her.  So I want to be clear what we’re trying to do here.  This is NOT an expose of the IAT, or of Dr. Banaji.  I’m really grateful that she took the time to talk with me, and I’m grateful to Dr. Yarrow Dunham for connecting us.  But I believe strongly enough that the interview we conducted doesn’t tell the whole story of the IAT that I’m going to try to dig more deeply on it here so we can understand whether implicit bias is really something we should pay attention to.   Jen  12:28 So, in this episode my plan is to walk through what the research says about what implicit bias is, and how it’s measured, and why that’s important, and what implications this has for how we and our children interact with the world.  I should mention that the research base on this topic is absolutely massive, and even what has now turned into two episodes isn’t really enough to do it justice.   Jen  12:48 So our story starts with the creation of the Implicit Association Test, or IAT, and that story is told in Dr. Banaji and Greenwald’s book Blindspot.  A substantial chunk of the book is about convincing you that you have blindspots – that you and I, just like everyone else, don’t perceive things in the way they actually happened.  So, for example, if you’re on a jury in a murder trial where the defendant is accused of drunk driving, and an eyewitness says that the defendant staggered against a table and knocked a bowl to the floor as they left the party they were both at then you might believe the eye witness, but if the eye witness says “On his way out the door the defendant staggered against a serving table, knocking a bowl of guacamole dip to the floor and splattering guacamole on the white shag carpet,” you’ll be more convinced of the defendant’s guilt.  Vivid details make information more memorable (which, incidentally, is why stories in children’s textbooks often contain little snippets of vivid detail – they make the material easier to remember, which helps the child pass the test more easily).   Jen  13:41 We also make judgements about individuals based on how they look, and while we might think we’re pretty good at it we’re actually not researchers have asked research participants to judge the trustworthiness of people shown in photographs, they don’t do much better than chance at discriminating between Nobel Peace Prize recipients and criminals who have appeared on the TV show America’s Most Wanted.  A lot of the time we make judgements about people based on what social group they are in, which is why Dr. Dunham’s work is relevant here – you might want to revisit episode 28 on how social groups form for a refresher on that.   Jen  14:12 And then a chapter of Blindspot talks about how often we say things that aren’t true, even if we think we’re a pretty truthful person, such as the answers to the question “how are you?” which was a big cultural shock to me when I got to the U.S. because the person asking the question had often already walked by by the time I could even think about an answer, because they didn’t really want to know the answer to the question, which means the answer we give is pretty much irrelevant.  We might lie and say we don’t have any cash on us when a person on the street asks us for money or tell a telemarketer that we aren’t home when we were the one who answered the phone.  We may lie to the doctor when they ask how often we exercise, or how many drinks we have each day, or whether we’ve ever used illicit drugs.  We try to manage the impressions that other people have of us,

Explicitly, nobody really believes in gender stereotypes anymore, but when we look at the world, and who's where and how much money people make, and so on, it still seems to be there. And the answer to that is yeah, because it's there. It's just not something we say. It’s more of something we do. -Dr. Mahzarin Banaji   What is implicit bias?  Do I have it (and do you?)?  Does my (and your?) child have it?  And if we do have implicit bias, what, if anything, can we do about it? Join me in a conversation with Dr. Mahzarin Banaji, former Dean of the Department of Psychology at Harvard University and co-creator of the Implicit Association Test, for an overview of implicit bias and how we can know if we (and our children) have it. This episode will be followed by a second part in this mini-series where we dig deeply into the research, where results are complex and often contradictory.  Stay tuned!   Jump to highlights: (01:00) An intro of  Dr. Mahzarin Banaji (02:58) What is implicit bias? (07:48) Differentiating bias that you are aware of and bias that you aren’t aware of (08:56) Describing the Implicit Association test (18:11) What the research says about where implicit bias comes from (24:50) Development of group preference from implicit association (32:18) Group bias and its implications towards individual psychological health (40:44) What can be done to potentially prevent implicit biases from developing? (46:56) Some good progress with society’s bias in general and areas that need working on   Resources: Blindspot: Hidden Biases of Good People   [accordion] [accordion-item title="Click here to read the full transcript"] Jen  00:02 Hi, I'm Jen and I host the Your Parenting Mojo podcast.   Jen  00:06 We all want our children to lead fulfilling lives but it can be so hard to keep up with the latest scientific research on child development and figure out whether and how to incorporate it into our own approach to parenting. Here at Your Parenting Mojo, I do the work for you by critically examining strategies and tools related to parenting and child development that are grounded in scientific research and principles of respectful parenting.   Jen  00:29 If you'd like to be notified when new episodes are released, and get a FREE Guide called 13 Reasons Why Your Child Won't Listen To You and What To Do About Each One, just head over to YourParentingMojo.com/SUBSCRIBE.   Jen  00:42 You can also continue the conversation about the show with other listeners in the Your Parenting Mojo Facebook group. I do hope you'll join us.   Jen  01:00 Hello, and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. Today we're going to look at the topic of implicit bias. Now I've been thinking for a while about running a series of episodes on the connection between our brains and our bodies because I've been learning about that and the wisdom that our bodies can hold and wondering, well how can we learn how to pay more attention to our bodies? And then I started thinking about intuition. And I wondered, well, how can we know if we can trust our intuition? What if our intuition is biased? So I started looking at the concept of implicit bias and it became immediately clear who I should ask to interview Dr. Mahzarin Banaji. Dr. Banaji studies thinking and feeling as they unfold in a social context with a focus on mental systems that operate in implicit or unconscious mode. Since 2002, she has been Richard Clarke Cabot professor of social ethics in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University, where she was also the Chair of the Department of Psychology for four years while holding two other concurrent appointments. She has been elected fellow of a whole host of extremely impressive societies and was named William James Fellow for a lifetime of significant intellectual contributions to the basic science of psychology by the Association of Psychological Science, an organization of which she also served as president. Along with her colleague, Dr. Anthony Greenwald. She's conducted decades of research on implicit bias and co-authored the book Blindspot: Hidden Biases of Good People.   Jen  02:21 I should also say that there are a lot of issues that we only got a chance to skim over at a fairly high level in this conversation, which I'm recording this introduction afterwards, because Dr. Banaji was quite pressed for time. And I'm planning to release an episode that follows up into these issues and dives into them at a much deeper level soon. So please consider this part one of a two-part conversation with you.   Jen  02:42 Alright, let's go ahead and get started with the interview.   Jen  02:45 Welcome Dr. Banaji. Thanks so much for being here.   Dr. Mahzarin Banaji  02:48 Hi there.   Jen  02:49 So I wonder if we can start out by understanding a bit more about what implicit bias is. I hear it all over the place, and can you help us to just define what that is, please?   Dr. Mahzarin Banaji  02:58 Sure. So implicit bias, quite simply, is a tendency in every human being to favor one individual over another, one social group over another, and to do so without conscious awareness, or without the ability to be able to exert conscious control over the judgement that one is making. So let's just break the phrase down into the two words that constitute it. The word implicit and the word bias, okay? Bias, what is it? It's simply for us a deviation from neutrality, it is privileging one option over another, right? If I say I prefer blue to red, I'm biased in favor of blue, and not in favor of red relatively speaking. So that for us is what a bias is. And implicit just means that that favoring of red over blue or blue over red is something that I'm not even aware of. It's just that when I go into a store, I pick up clothing that is all blue rather than red. That put together tells us that implicit bias is a deviation from neutrality in ways we ourselves would not be happy to see ourselves doing. If it's in the domain of color, who cares whether I prefer blue to red or red to blue but imagine now that it's not blue and red. Imagine that it is a native born child in the classroom, and an immigrant child in the classroom. And even though I as a teacher believe very much that both should be treated equally that is to say, if they do something good, I should reward both equally. If they did something that's bad behavior, I should reprimand them equally, I should encourage both equally to pursue new things in their lives. I should support both of them equally to meet their goals and so on. A deviation from neutrality would mean that I'm doing these things both the good and bad things in order to teach a child something, that I'm doing them selectively, that I'm doing more for one category over another. So that's all biases. And teachers are so well intentioned, just like parents, what they want is the best for all of the kids in their class. And so when we discovered that a teacher may not be aware but is systematically calling on certain people in the classroom, or saying, "Aha!" or "Good idea!" to some rather than others, then we would say it's implicit. And as you can imagine, teachers, by and large, are very good people and so when they're biased it is almost always without their awareness.   Jen  05:41 Okay, so is this lack of awareness perspective, that's really the key, then?   Dr. Mahzarin Banaji  05:45 That's exactly right. And the reason this is interesting is because if you look in almost any society, but let's just take American society or the Western world or whatever, some large group of people, you will notice that explicit forms of bias have been coming down, at least in what people say on a survey. If you say to a teacher, "Do you think that native born children are just inherently smarter than immigrant children?" The teacher will likely say, "No, I don't believe that that is the case at all. I think all children are talented in all these different ways." So if you measure it explicitly, if you say, "Tell me is this immigrant kid better or worse than this native one kid?" You will not see any evidence of bias. But when you sit in the back of the classroom, and you just measure what the teacher is doing, who the teacher looks at who the teacher says nice things to who the teacher calls on, and you see that there is a systematic difference, then we say we must become interested in this, because the child is experiencing these good and bad things the teacher is doing, but the teacher has no awareness. And think about the child. What does the child think is going on? The child might think I'm bad, or I'm good, right? And that's why we should be interested in both kinds of measures, what people say to us directly, and also what they may not be able to say because they don't think they're that way.   Jen  07:10 Okay, I'm wondering if we can just pull that apart a little bit. And we're sort of using teachers as an example. But this could just as well apply to managers or anyone in any situation. I can understand if a researcher were to come and say, "Do you think that native born children have different capabilities than immigrant children?" Then, I understand the correct thing for me to say in that moment is "No, of course not." But I may still be thinking that and I may have awareness that I'm thinking that. So I'm trying to understand the difference between an explicit bias that I know it's not a socially correct thing to say, and implicit bias that I might not be aware of, how can I parse that difference?   Dr. Mahzarin Banaji  07:48 Yeah, it's a great question. For now, I would say, an explicit bias is something that you know, even if you don't say it to other people, but you know. So let's say that I believe that boys are better at math than girls are. But I'm not going to say that because I don't want my girl students to hear that or feel bad about that. And so I'm not going to say it, but I think it and I'm able to consciously put those words together in my mind, boys are better at math than girls, I know that. As long as that is the case, we would say it's consciously accessible to you. Your mind is capable of saying A is better than B or whatever and to do that to yourself, at least. What makes it implicit is when you say boys and girls are equally good at math, I believe it. You never say to yourself; boys are better at math than girls. But if we look at some other aspects of your behavior, who you spend more time teaching a difficult math problem to, etc., then we would say it is.   Jen  08:56 Okay, perfect. Thank you for helping us to understand that distinction. And so then I wonder if we can go from there into the Implicit Association test, which is something you've spent a bit of time working on over the years. Can you tell us what that is? And how does that measure implicit bias?   Dr. Mahzarin Banaji  09:11 Yeah. So as you can imagine, your listeners and you will easily see what the problem is. A person, if asked genuinely and truly says, "I have no bias." And when you measure their judgments and actions in some way, you're seeing a systematic effect. How do you measure that? When the person themselves is saying no? In psychology, we've relied for over 100 years on what we call explicit measures. If you want to know something about what a person is thinking, ask them. How stressed are you feeling? Okay. Well, sometimes maybe I can tell you that I'm feeling stressed. But there are lots of studies where people like me say that they're not stressed at all and you'll see me breaking out into hives or something, which is a response to the stress. Now you have to have a measure of those hives, you have to be able to measure skin complexion, you know, when one is stressed and not stressed and say whether the person knows it or not, there is some physical response that we can measure. What can we do when the response we are looking for is locked up between our ears in a box that is not easy to penetrate? So the first thing to do is to just imagine the difficulty of trying to even track anything implicit and the measure that you mentioned, the one that we are most familiar with, and the one that I believe today is the dominant measure of implicit cognition in the science as a whole is the Implicit Association test, and I'm one of three co developers of that test. The test has a very simple assumption that underlies it. The assumption is that when two things in our experience have come to go together repeatedly, they're joined in time and in space, let's say, that they become one for us. If when I see bread, there is usually a bowl of butter, bread and butter come to be associated when I think bread, butter comes to mind more quickly than some random word like water, or couch or something like that. So that's very easy to understand and neuroscientists, actually, in order to teach people how neurons in our brain fire after having learned something, they teach it to us by the phrase, if it fires together, it wires together. And we use that when we teach how learning occurs. By firing together, it means in the same moment, if neurons for bread and butter becoming activated, your brain learns that there's something about these that go together, and that's how we learn everything. We learn, you know, that mother and father are a unit, like bread and butter, but we also know certain experiences we have in the presence of something. When I see flowers, I feel happy, and flowers becomes associated flowers almost become synonymous with good, even though the words that we might use to capture goodness have nothing to do with flowers. So you know, not just words like beautiful or peace or joy, but if we use words like you know, angel, or satisfied, or whatever that have no semantic relationship to flowers, those words should become more easily accessible in the presence of flowers because our experience has made them repeatedly be associated. Unlike insects, when we think of an insect, we think yucky, I mean, unless you're a five-year-old boy, yes, I will put them aside for a moment. And say that, yes, that may happen. But even young boys, when they take our test, if it's flower or insect, they have learned that in our culture, flowers are good, and insects are bad. So all we've done is made a test that measures the strength of association between insects, and bad and good flowers and bad and good. Okay, that's what the test is. And now we can begin to go beyond the test by keeping the test logic identical. If I have you look at flowers on a computer screen and press a key - left key when you see flowers on the right key when you see insects - very easy for you to do that. Now I'm going to say okay, not just flowers and insects, but words are going to pop up on the screen words like love and peace and joy, good words, or bad words like devil and bomb and war and things like that. And your job is to use the same key to say flower or good words, and the same key, now a different but the same key when you identify an insect, as having appeared on the screen, or a bad word is having appeared on the screen. Now, if flower and good have truly become one in our minds, this should be a very easy task. Left key for flowers left key for good. Right key for insect right key for bad, right? That's easy. But now let's switch. This is the moment in the test when people groan because I'm saying to them left key for flower and left key for bad things, right key for insect and right key for good things. And they can't do it. By can't do it I mean, they can, but it takes them a whole lot longer to do this and they make many more mistakes when they do this. I show this bias, you show this bias. You know, even entomologists who study insects and love them, show it but to a lesser extent than we do. So they acquired the cultural thumbprint that says insects are not as good as flowers, but because they love insects and they work with them. They show a lower anti insect bias.   Jen  14:51 Fascinating.   Dr. Mahzarin Banaji  14:52 Okay, so now, the logic of the test should be very clear to people, and they will mostly agree in fact, everybody will agree that this is a decent measure of whether we like flowers or insects. And when the data come back and tell you, you have a strong preference for flowers over insects, people nod their head and say, "Yes, I do." There's no quarrel with the test. The quarrel with the test emerges when we replace insect and flower with Black and White faces, Asian and White faces, fat and thin people, people who are Native Americans and European Americans. And sometimes when we even change the good and bad words, to be things like bad and good things like weapons and musical instruments or something like that. Is it easier for me to associate, you know, certain groups with bad things and certain groups with good things? And the startling result is that for people who have, and I would say, genuinely have no explicit bias, now, I can't say what your explicit bias is, because you may think that you think that you know, male is better than female, but you may not be willing to tell me, but I'll take myself, I know that explicitly, I do not believe that Black is bad, and White is good. I know that for sure because it's me, and I can tell myself the truth about what I consciously think. And yet for people like me, who seem to have no explicit bias, this test throws us a curveball, because it demonstrates that people like me are not able to associate good with Black as easily as we can associated with White. And when that happens, it's troubling to us. It's troubling because it doesn't feel like the test is telling us anything true about ourselves. I don't blame people who say what a stupid test is just telling me, you know, it's just all complete lies. I felt the same way when I first took the test. I thought, "What's wrong with this test?" Obviously, I'm the great Mahzarin I'm not biased, so if the test is telling me I am, something's wrong with the test. And you know, a few minutes later, I came to my senses and I realized it's not the test that's the problem. It's my head that's the problem. I have accumulated all this learning two things have gone together, it fired together, it wired together.   Jen  17:22 Okay. All right. Well, thank you for that. And I think there's a lot of different pieces to come up from that, that we're going to get to in due time as we go through the conversation, but I'm wondering if maybe we can start with “Where does this come from?” Because in preparation for this interview, you sent me an epic paper that you had written with one of your grad students, and the reference list alone was enough to make me weep when I saw it,

"When she was younger, she wasn't that into reading and that was like a huge deal for me.  I thought: "I'm such a reader. My daughter doesn't love to read." She's still not a big reader, but it's not hampering her in any way. She's blossoming in fifty other ways, but when I get caught in that story, "She's not like me. She's not..." - that's when I'm suffering. So I settle back into trusting, and think: "Oh, she's becoming who she is. Let her be that." -Diana Winston   Meditation is touted as being a cure-all for everything from anxiety to depression to addictions.  But is it possible that all this is too good to be true?   In this episode, meditation teacher - and former Buddhist nun! - Diana Winston guides us through what we know of the research on meditation that's relevant to parents.  It turns out that the quality of much of this research isn't amazing, but this may not matter to you if you're thinking of starting a meditation practice because the opportunity cost (a few minutes a day) is so low and the potential benefits are so high.   We walk through a basic meditation that you can do anywhere, and no - it doesn't involve sitting cross-legged with your thumb and first finger held in a circle and saying 'ommmmmm....'.   I was skeptical about meditation too - until I tried it.  Perhaps it might help you as well?   Taming Your Triggers If you need help with your own big feelings about your child’s behavior, Taming Your Triggers is now open for enrollment. We’ll help you to: Understand the real causes of your triggered feelings, and begin to heal the hurts that cause them Use new tools like the ones Katie describes to find ways to meet both her and her children’s needs Effectively repair with your children on the fewer instances when you are still triggered It’s a 10-week workshop with one module delivered every week, an amazing community of like-minded parents, a match with an AccountaBuddy to help you complete the workshop, and mini-mindfulness practices to re-ground yourself repeatedly during your days, so you’re less reactive and more able to collaborate with your children. Sign up for the waitlist and we'll let you know once enrollment re-opens. Click the image below to learn more.   Jump to highlights 02:36 Introducing Diana Winston 03:39 Defining Mindfulness 05:25 Distinguishing between mindfulness and meditation 06:26 How can mindfulness benefit me? 08:05 Self-hatred as a Western concept 12:27 The practice of mindfulness rooted in religion and cultural appropriation 13:57 The research on mindfulness 17:27 Why is it so hard to study mindfulness? 19:33 Mindfulness vs science as tools of observation 21:26 The benefits of mindfulness to parents and children 28:04 Improving parent-child relationships through mindfulness 30:27 Working in mindfulness practices in the context of communities 35:52 Practice mindfulness now with this quick walkthrough 42:46 Sit Still and It Will Hurt Eventually   Useful links: Taming Your Triggers Workshop   Books and other resources: The Little Book of Being: Practices and Guidance for Uncovering Your Natural Awareness Waking Up App by Sam Harris UCLA Mindful App Ten Percent Happier App Wide Awake: A Buddhist Guide for Teens   Facebook Group: Your Parenting Mojo Facebook Group   References D’Andrea, W., Ford, J., Stolbach, B., Spinazzola, J., & van der Kolk, B. (2012). Understanding inter-personal trauma in children: Why we need a developmentally appropriate trauma diagnosis. American Journal of Orthopsyhchiatry 82(2), 187-200. Goessl, V.C., Curtiss, J.E., & Hofman, S.G. (2017). The effect of heart rate variability biofeedback training on stress and anxiety: A meta-analysis. Psychological Medicine 47, 2578-2586. Miller, A. (2006). The body never lies: The lingering effects of hurtful parenting. New York: Norton. Tippet, K. (2019, December 26). Bessel van der Kolk: How trauma lodges in the body. On Being. Retrieved from:https://onbeing.org/programs/bessel-van-der-kolk-how-trauma-lodges-in-the-body/van der Kolk, B. (2017). Developmental trauma disorder: Toward a rational diagnosis for children with complex trauma histories. Psychiatric Annals 35(5), 401-408.van der Kolk, B. (2016). The devastating effects of ignoring child maltreatment in psychiatry: Commentary on “The enduring neurobiological effects of abuse and neglect.” Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry 57(3), 267-270.van der Kolk, B.A., Stone, L., West, J., Rhodes, A., Emerson, D., Suvak, M., & Spinazzola, J. (2014). Yoga as an adjunctive treatment for Posttraumatic Stress Disorder: A randomized controlled trial. Journal of Clinical Psychiatry 75(6), e559-e565.van der Kolk, B. (2014). The body keeps the score: Brain, mind, and body in the healing of trauma. New York: Penguin.van der Kolk, B., Stone, L., West, J., Rhodes, A., Emerson, D., Suvak, M., & Spinazzola, J. (2014). Yoga as an adjunctive treatment for Posttraumatic Stress Disorder: A randomized controlled trial. Journal of Clinical Psychiatry 75(6), e559-e565.van der Kolk, B. (2006). Clinical implications of neuroscience research in PTSD.Annals – New York Academy of Sciences 1071(1), 277.van der Kolk, B., & van der Hart, O. (1989). Pierre Janet & the breakdown of adaptation in psychological trauma. American Journal of Psychiatry 146(12), 1530-1540.

Why do we yell at our children - even when we know we shouldn't? Why isn't just knowing what to do enough to actually interact with our children in a way that aligns with our values? For many of us, the reason we struggle to actually implement the ideas we know we want to use is because we've experienced trauma in our lives. This may be the overt kind that we can objectively say was traumatic (divorce, abuse, death among close family members...), or it may simply be the additive effect of having our needs disregarded over and over again by the people who were supposed to protect us. These experiences cause us to feel 'triggered' by our children's behavior - because their mess and lack of manners and resistance remind us subconsciously of the ways that we were punished as children for doing very similar things. These feelings don't just show up in our brains, they also have deep connections to our bodies (in spite of the Western idea that the body and brain are essentially separate!). If we don't decide to take a different path and learn new tools to enable us to respond effectively to our child rather than reacting in the heat of the moment, and because our physical experience is so central to how this trauma shows up in our daily lives, we also need to understand and process this trauma through our bodies. If you need help understanding the source of your triggered feelings and learning new ways to navigate them so you can feel triggered less often, my popular and highly effective Taming Your Triggers workshop will be open soon. Sliding scale pricing will be available, and the community will meet on a platform that isn't Facebook! Sign up for the waitlist and we'll let you know once enrollment re-opens. Click the image below to learn more.     Jump to highlights: (01:00) This episode’s rationale (03:12) The two ways trauma shows up in broader family relationships (05:27) The separateness of the brain and the body has a long history in Western culture (06:05) Rene Descartes on the schism of mind and body (07:12) The held belief of the mind as superior to the rest of the body (08:09) The inherent bias of data (09:42) The lies our brain tells us (12:54) The so-called 4 ‘truths’ of the physical experience of trauma (16:22) When we are not attuned to the signals that our body is giving us (19:01) Difficulty in identifying feelings for people who experienced trauma (22:16) Saying OK when you aren’t really OK (26:19) The difference between reacting and responding (27:10) Using physical experience to bring order to the chaos in our minds (31:15) The first step to creating a safe environment for your child (33:26) The root of our inability to create meaningful relationships (34:18) Equipping ourselves with the tools to regulate our arousal   Other episodes mentioned: 113: No Self, No Problem 069: Reducing the impact of intergenerational trauma Responding to the U.S. Capitol Siege Dismantling White Supremacy and Patriarchy on MLK Day   Links: Taming Your Triggers Workshop   Facebook group: Your Parenting Mojo Facebook Group   [accordion] [accordion-item title="Click here to read the full transcript"] Jen  00:02 Hi, I'm Jen and I host the Your Parenting Mojo Podcast. We all want our children to lead fulfilling lives, but it can be so hard to keep up with the latest scientific research on child development and figure out whether and how to incorporate it into our own approach to parenting. Here at Your Parenting Mojo, I do the work for you by critically examining strategies and tools related to parenting and child development that are grounded in scientific research and principles of respectful parenting. If you'd like to be notified when new episodes are released and get a FREE Guide called 13 Reasons Why Your Child Won't Listen To You and What To Do About Each One, just head over to YourParentingMojo.com/SUBSCRIBE. You can also continue the conversation about the show with other listeners and the Your Parenting Mojo Facebook group. I do hope you'll join us.   Jen  01:00 Hello, and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo Podcast. The topic of our episode today is the Physical Reasons You Yell at Your Kids, which is kind of a shorthand way of talking about how the traumatic events that we've experienced in our lives show up in our bodies, and how we can use our physical experience to start healing from trauma. As we do that, we're going to extend ideas we've discussed before on the show related to our experience of trauma and we'll link those to a series of episodes that's getting underway on how our physical experience in our bodies impacts our mental states and wellbeing and how our bodies interact with our brains to both receive and also give information, which is an area of study that's very often completely overlooked in psychology.   Jen  01:40 As we get better and better at producing large and expensive equipment that allows us to see how the brain works, we become ever more focused on finding the exact part in the brain that's going wrong when we have what's described as a mental illness or some kind of learning difficulty, when actually our brains are just a small part of the interconnected web of stuff that makes us up.   Jen  02:00 So those of you who have been listening for a while now will be able to trace the origins of this episode back to the interview with Dr. Rebecca Babcock-Fenerci on the subject of intergenerational trauma. You'll also see links to the conversation with Dr. Chris Niebauer on his book No Self, No Problem, where we talked about the stories that are left brains make up to try to explain our circumstances. I started delving back into this material when I was researching content for my Supporting Your Child’s Learning membership on non-cognitive ways of learning or learning through our bodies as well as our brains.  And then I remembered the concept of implicit bias, and wondered how much of the ideas we form rapidly, which may seem to be what we think of as ‘gut feelings’ about a situation, do these really come from the gut? I dove into that research a few weeks ago, and I have an interview with Dr. Mazharin Banaji, Director of the Department of Psychology at Harvard University, and co-creator of the famous Implicit Association Test that you can take online to discover your implicit bias coming up in a few weeks, I really wanted to dig into can we actually trust these ideas that we think of as gut feelings. But before we get there, I wanted to spend some time thinking about the ways that trauma we've experienced shows up in our bodies, and what impact this has on our relationships with our broader families, but specifically with our children.   Jen  03:12 We do know that there are two ways trauma shows up in these relationships – we actually have evidence that trauma is passed on intergenerationally through our genes.  There isn’t a direct relationship between your parent experiencing trauma and that being passed on; it’s more like something in your genes is changed and when you find yourself having a certain kind of experience this turns certain genes on or off, so there’s an interaction between our experience and our genes that can result in a certain predisposition and personality.  And then the second way that trauma is passed on is through the way we interact with our children.  In some cases when we have experienced severe trauma in early life we may experience life-long abnormal physiological stress reactions, and measurable differences in the development of certain brain regions that are associated with attention, impulse control, and affect regulation.  This is why it can be so difficult for parents who experienced neglect or abuse to develop positive, trusting relationships with their children.  Even when the trauma the parent experienced was more modest in nature we may find ourselves having an outsized reaction to our child’s age-appropriate but perhaps annoying behavior – we go into fight or flight mode and we scream at our child or threaten them with unreasonable punishments or maybe spank them, or we go into freeze mode and we simply shut down.  We emotionally or actually physically just walk away.   Jen  04:23 So if you’re seeing that you’re having interactions with your child where you’re regularly feeling explosive or shut down, I’d encourage you to join my Taming Your Triggers workshop which is currently open for registration right now through midnight Pacific on Sunday February 28th.  We’ll help you to uncover the true sources of your triggered feelings, which aren’t actually in your child’s behavior, and feel triggered less often, and respond to your child more effectively on the fewer occasions when it does still happen.  It’s a 10-week workshop with lots of support from me as you go through it, and it’s not an exaggeration to say that the results can be incredibly profound if you really engage with it.  Participants regularly find that they can cope with difficult situations with their children in a way that’s much more aligned with their values even in high-pressure situations like when they’ve been at home with the children by themselves for weeks on end, and some parents find that it is one of the most profound experiences of their lives.  So I do hope you’ll consider joining me for that – sliding scale pricing is available for people who need it, and I’m using a new platform to host the support community, so you don’t have to be on Facebook either.  So, to learn more about the workshop to go YourParentingMojo.com/TamingYourTriggers.   Jen  05:27 So one of the reasons that we have so much trouble with understanding what our bodies are telling us is because for centuries, we've denied there's a connection between our brains and our bodies. In his very readable book Intelligence in the Flesh, Dr. Guy Claxton traces this idea from the Greeks, who associated intellect with a higher form of being than physical athleticism.  Christianity adopted these attitudes, seeing the body as ‘sin’s instrument,’ as something lower down, associated with misfortune, breaking down, and the depths of hell.  Things that were higher, like our heads and brains, were bright, light, pure, and ethereal, and similar ideas can be found in religions from Buddhism to Hinduism and Islam.   Jen  06:05 Philosopher Rene Descartes took this idea and ran with it in the 1600s, saying “There is nothing included in the concept of the body that belongs to the mind, and nothing in that of mind that belongs to the body.”  Until we could properly understand how our brains and bodies worked, we couldn’t possibly have comprehended that they might actually work together in a dynamic, intricate whole.  The Descartes view of the brain is essentially of a CEO in a glass-walled office, issuing edicts that the robots on the factory floor must obey to keep the systems running.  This view sees the mind and the brain as inseparable, and any rational intelligent thought we have occurs in the brain.  Even though we can now see a great deal of how the brain works, we really don’t understand it very much better than we did 400 years ago.  And we do still see intelligent work that is seen as happening primarily in the brain as being more important and valuable than work we do primarily with our bodies.  We measure people’s intelligence by taking them out of the contextual environment they understand with their bodies and sit them in an examination room that is supposed to be neutral but is actually very stressful for a lot of people and ask them to manipulate relationships between out-of-context words and shapes.   Jen  07:12 And at the top of all of this, overseeing the show, is the CEO in his glass office (and yes, I’m going to say it’s a ‘he’).  The CEO is assumed to have an accurate perception of everything else that’s going on around (thanks to those glass walls) and can take on new information and integrate it with information he already has and then tells the robots what to do.  He might receive information from the robots about things like how much energy they have left and whether they’re short of other resources they need, but in general the instructions flow downhill. The CEO makes rational decisions by logically weighing the benefits of one action against the benefits of another action and reaching the most justifiable conclusion.  Most emotional or physical information that might enter this system is at best seen as something that is irrelevant, and at worst it’s something that is interfering with our ability to make a rational decision and must be ignored. It’s not a big leap from there to say that because women are presumed to be more affected by their emotions they must be less intelligent than men.   Jen  08:09 As a side note, this is linked to our reliance on scientific research to understand our world. True scientific research must be free of the bias of emotions, although in reality of course this is impossible so scientists just write in the third person to imply neutrality even though they can never truly be neutral. I sometimes get criticized by people who are reviewing the podcast because they say I'm biased, although the reviewers often say they're just here for the data, because the data themselves are presumed to be unbiased. When actually there's bias baked into every aspect of the scientific process, from how the research question is posed to the sampling method use to the data collection to the analysis to which of the results are discussed most prominently and make it into the abstract. So there's bias inherent in all aspects of this method. It's just that I'm honest about where mine are. And I'll do an episode with more detail on this at some point. So we presume that we can mostly make rational decisions based on the data that's available to us. But sometimes parts of the brain that we don't understand especially well how our unconscious bubbles up into the system, kind of like an employee who shows up drunk to holiday parties, we might be a bit embarrassed by their presence, and we often try to pretend they aren't really there. And we may try and find simple explanations for their behavior, but we shy away from asking them what's really going on with them to understand how this behavior is helping them to meet a need they have.   Jen  09:27 So in general, the ideas that my brain runs the show, and that I can understand and be mostly in control of my brain are ones that have actually gained strength in the 20th century as we became more interested in how the brain works and began using computers as a metaphor for this.   Jen  09:42 But it turns out that this view of how our brain works is really problematic.  We think of our brains as having a pretty accurate view of the world; that if we remember something happening then it must have happened in that way; our brains are like a video camera that is accurately perceiving everything that shows up in front of it.  But actually we don’t work like this at all.  You’ve probably seen the online game where you’re supposed to count the number of passes of a basketball between a group of people and you completely fail to see the person dressed up in the gorilla suit walking in between the players.  And you may recall from the No Self, No Problem episode that the left side of our brain, which is where all of this information is supposedly rationally processed, makes up stories all the time.  We cross a wobbly bridge over a deep gorge and our brain mis-registers our fear as attraction toward the researcher who approaches us on the other side.  Our friend doesn’t call us back to make dinner plans and we spin a story about how they don’t respect us or our friendship.  Or we fail to account for the stories the other person’s left brain is making up as well – my Dad is moving house and he recently texted me to ask if I wanted some old fabric scraps I’d left in his attic, and it brought back memories of how my stepmother had made some snide comments about my patchwork project.  I told him that she was kind of mean to me about that, and he replied that he thought she was jealous of the things I was good...

In this episode we talk with Iris Chen about her new book, Untigering: Peaceful Parenting for the Deconstructing Tiger Parent. Iris admits to being a parent who engaged in "yelling, spanking, and threatening with unreasonable consequences" - but far from becoming a well-behaved, obedient child, her son fought back.  The harder she punished, the more he resisted. Their home became a battleground of endless power struggles, uncontrollable tantrums, and constant frustration. But Iris didn't know what else to do: she had learned this over-controlling style from her own parents: watching TV without permission, talking back to her father, and having a boyfriend before college were simply out of the question when she was growing up. In her parents' eyes, they had done all the right things: Iris got good grades, graduated from an elite university, and married another successful Chinese-American. But through interacting with her son, Iris realized that all of these achievements had come at a great cost: a cost that her son was trying to show her through his resistance.  Eventually Iris saw that her son's behavior wasn't the problem; he was simply reacting to her attempts to control him, and that it was her own approach that needed to change. Now Iris is well along her own Untigering path: basing her relationship with her children on finding win-win solutions to problems, being flexible, and respecting each other's boundaries. As I do too, Iris sees this path as a journey toward creating a society where everyone belongs. If you see yourself in Iris' descriptions of her early days as a parent, and especially if you find yourself routinely overreacting to your child's age-appropriate behavior, I invite you to join my Taming Your Triggers workshop, which will help you to understand the true source of your triggered feelings (hint: it isn't your child's behavior!), feel triggered less often, and respond more effectively to your child on the fewer occasions when it does still happen. Sign up for the waitlist and we'll let you know once enrollment re-opens. Click the image below to learn more.           Jump to highlights: (01:34) Children’s dilemma between being seen/heard and being accepted (02:50) The trauma we pass on to our children (04:04) How to tame your triggers (04:59) Confidence in parenting that gives parents a sense of calm (06:39) Iris as a Deconstructing Tiger Parent (08:13) “I thought my responsibility as a parent was to push harder when my child resisted” (09:26) “I saw in my children a freedom to express their resentment in ways that I was never free to” (11:05) The walls that are created between parent and child because children’s authentic selves are not accepted (11:24) Our parents have their own traumas as well (13:18) The Idea of Untigering (14:19) Permissive parenting (16:06) Viewing children as full human beings (18:43) Adultism and Childism (20:05) Is respect something a child needs to earn from their parents? (21:26) Redefining our ideas for success as parents (27:29) Navigating the needs that drive behavior (31:30) Chinese somatization (33:57) The internalization of injustice and suffering (36:50) Holding space for one another and the greater community (41:19) The cascading effect of changing the way we relate to our children   Books and Resources: Untigering: Peaceful Parenting for the Deconstructing Tiger Parent The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma   Links: Taming Your Triggers Workshop Upbringing Podcast Untigering Website   Join the YPM Facebook Community Your Parenting Mojo Facebook Group   [accordion] [accordion-item title="Click here to read the full transcript"] Jen  00:02 Hi, I'm Jen and I host the Your Parenting Mojo Podcast. We all want our children to lead fulfilling lives, but it can be so hard to keep up with the latest scientific research on child development and figure out whether and how to incorporate it into our own approach to parenting. Here at Your Parenting Mojo, I do the work for you by critically examining strategies and tools related to parenting and child development that are grounded in scientific research and principles of respectful parenting. If you'd like to be notified when new episodes are released, and get a FREE Guide called 13 Reasons Why Your Child Won't Listen To You and What To Do About Each One, just head over to YourParentingMojo.com/SUBSCRIBE. You can also continue the conversation about the show with other listeners and the Your Parenting Mojo Facebook group. I do hope you'll join us.   Jen  01:00 Hello and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo Podcast. In today's Sharing Your Parenting Mojo episode we hear from Iris Chen who I first found on Instagram and then started reading her blog on her website Untigering.com. Iris describes herself as an American-born Chinese who somehow ended up with kids who are Chinese-born Americans. She writes about navigating life and parenting at the intersection of her Chinese and American identities and as a deconstructing Tiger Mother who's trying to become a gentle parent. She's just published a book called appropriately enough Untigering: Peaceful Parenting For the Deconstructing Tiger Parent.   Jen  01:34 Before we meet Iris, I also wanted to mention you're going to hear a lot in this episode related to trauma.  Trauma that we parents may have experienced ourselves and also trauma that's been passed down through the generations in our families. And this trauma shows up in the ways we interact with our children. Trauma can be the classic things you might think of like experiencing war or sexual abuse, but it can also show up in much milder circumstances like being ridiculed by a parent. This can be incredibly difficult for a child to bear because it represents a rupture of the attachment relationship that's so important to our well-being. When our parent causes us to feel shame and humiliation because of something we did or said, we find it hard to accept that they could be wrong, because as far as we know, they see and know everything. And they tell us so often they love us so they must be right. And we ended up walling off the part of ourselves that was trying to meet the need we had when we did the thing that our parents disapproved of. It's too hard for us to hold the two truths together, that we can need these things like respect and autonomy and the ability to make real choices, and that we also need to be accepted and loved by our parent. And very often our need for acceptance wins out and we put the other need on hold. We deny that it exists, but it does still exist, and it lives on somewhere deep inside us, waiting for a chance for us to be truly seen and known as whole people.   Jen  02:50 When we've experienced trauma, we may realize that while we thought we had it all under control for much of our lives, and it wasn't really impacting us so much anymore. When we have children, we can find that just through being normal children doing things that normal children do, many of which may be the very same things that we did as children that upset our own parents so much our children trigger reminders of the trauma we've suffered. When this happens, we tend to go into one of three instinctive modes: Fight or Flight where we're ready to take action back before many of us lived in houses. This would have prepared us to either fight a bear or run away from it. Or maybe we freeze which in our parenting often comes out as emotionally shutting down, maybe physically walking away from a situation that feels like more than we can deal with. Or if we've survived abuse, we may use a fawning mode or we try to placate the other person to minimize the rupture between us.   Jen  03:39 While we can't say there's a direct relationship between the trauma we've experienced and the likelihood we'll pass this down to our children, we do know that trauma is transferred intergenerationally through a combination of the expression of our genes and our parenting style. And we can also be reasonably sure that if we don't take steps to do things differently, this kind of trauma is going to keep on impacting us and our relationships with our children. This kind of stuff doesn't fix itself or just go away.   Jen  04:04 If you're realizing that maybe you need help understanding the trauma you've experienced both on a cognitive level in your brain and also on a physical level in your body, and that you need help finding new ways to cope in moments when your children's behavior makes you explode, apparently, without warning, I do hope you'll join my highly popular Taming Your Triggers workshop, which is now open for registration. So many parents have taken this workshop and found that even just the insight into the origins of their triggered feelings has brought a great sense of relief. One participant told me that the email about understanding our relationship with our mothers as a source of our triggered feelings "dropped a bomb on me that I never saw coming. Of course, I realized I had issues with my mom but not the extent to which it affected my actions on an hourly basis." So we get insight into the origins of these feelings and begin to heal from that trauma, but we also go on to develop tools you can use to create space between your child's behavior and your reaction.   Jen  04:59 Where it probably seems like there is no space right now, then once you have that space, you'll learn ways to respond to your child that are aligned with your values as a parent, rather than reacting based on your trauma history will also help you repair your relationship with your child, so they don't take on your triggered reaction as their own trauma and develop your self-compassion skills. So you don't beat yourself up every time you don't do things perfectly, which you won't because none of us do. In the workshop, you'll receive content released weekly over the course of 10 weeks, and you'll get support from me and the other parents on this journey in a private community that isn't on Facebook. Parents who have really engaged with this work find it seriously life changing, knowing that you can respond to your child from a place that allows you to feel your feelings, while not being yanked around them. And going from zero to apoplectic or shut down in a second, gives parents a great deal of confidence that they've really got this parenting thing, which brings an incredible sense of calm. If you'd like to learn more about the Taming Your Triggers Workshop, please go to YourParentingMojo.com/TamingYourTriggers. Doors close on February 28, 2021. So we can get started as a group on March 1 and sliding scale pricing is available. Once again. That's YourParentingMojo.com/TamingYourTriggers.   Jen  06:16 Okay, so without further ado, let's talk with Iris Chen about her own journey from overcontrolling Tiger Parent to being a parent who can respond to her children's needs from a place of calmness and connection. Welcome, Iris.   Iris Chen  06:27 Thank you so much for having me again.   Jen  06:29 And so I wonder maybe we can start by hearing a little bit about what you were like as a parent in your children's early years. Where did that approach come from?   Iris Chen  06:39 Sure. So yeah, I call myself a Deconstructing Tiger Parent, because I definitely started out as a pretty typical, you know, controlling Tiger Parent: was very strict, had a lot of rules, expected obedience. And yeah, I write about the story at the beginning of my book, were one of my children, as a toddler, I was like obsessed with getting enough sleep, you know, as young parents were so sleep deprived. And so regardless of whether or not he was tired, I was going to make him have a nap. And so I would, you know, place him in bed, I would flip him towards the wall. If he began turning his body at all, I would flip him back, if he like, got out of bed or did anything, you know, I threatened, I spanked, I yelled, I did all those things. And so that was just like one little snapshot of sort of the type of parenting that I practiced early on, where it was very controlling, very coercive, and created a really toxic and contentious relationship with my child. So it's something that I look back on with a lot of sadness and yeah, but I'm just glad that I'm not there anymore and I'm really excited about helping other parents move away from that type of parenting.   Jen  07:56 Yeah, and we're going to dig very deeply into the moving away part. I'd love to spend just a little bit more time in the "in" part, if you wouldn't mind. I'm wondering...   Iris Chen  08:05 Sure.   Jen  08:06 ...how did your children respond to you when you were trying to exert too much control over them?   Iris Chen 08:13 Yeah, they did not, especially my older child did not respond well at all. Like, he resisted my attempts. And I just thought that my responsibility was then to push harder. And to Yeah, like it was a battle of the wills and I was going to win, you know, that's what I believed was my responsibility. And so I came down harder. I had harsher punishments, all of that. And it just kept on escalating and escalating to a point where I was at a loss, like, I did not know what else I should do, you know, so I really began to question but yeah, they did not respond very well. My second child was much more complain but my oldest child was like, very sensitive and overwhelmed easily and I read that, I interpreted that as rebellion and disobedience. And so yeah, I came down harder on him.   Jen  09:12 Yeah, I was also curious as I was reading as well about whether you saw yourself in either of your children's responses, like did you look back and think, "Oh, yeah, I was like that as a child, or I totally wasn't like that. And why is my child like that?"   Iris Chen 09:26 I think I like on the surface for me, I was a very compliant child where I learned to be, I learned to follow the rules. I learned to obey and do whatever was expected of me. But inside I was like, always simmering with resentment. And so what I saw in my children was sort of like them, feeling free to express their resentment in ways that I was never free to, like I never talked back to my dad. I never, you know, expressed, you know, like, slammed the door. Well, I can't say never slammed the door, but just a lot of ways that they were expressing their resistance to my control in ways that I was never free to. So when they began to do that, I'm pretty sure it took me aback because I was never allowed to do that. But as I began to dig deeper, I realized that those were also the feelings that I felt as a child, like nobody likes to be, you know, shamed, or you know, threatened or punished in those ways. So, yeah, I think as I dug deeper, I saw that they were really expressing things that I also experienced as a child.   Jen  10:35 Mm hmm. Yeah. And when we look back on this, I think it becomes more obvious that we can see that we created these walls between what the authentic are us and the way we want to authentically show up in the world, and what we know to be socially acceptable. And we think to ourselves, well, this is how I really feel but my parent, whoever it is, cannot live with that cannot accept that. And so I'm going to present this compliant view of myself to the world, but the other part of us didn't go away. Right?   Iris Chen 11:05 Right, exactly. So I think there are ways that like, in some ways, maybe my parents felt that they had raised a good daughter, you know, but there was a wall that was created because of that, because I couldn't show them parts of myself, I couldn't really be who I really was in front of them, because that was not accepted.   Jen  11:24 Yeah. Yeah. And you raised in the book as well about how some of this has roots in your parents' traumas and the traumas that they've experienced. And I think that for so many of us, I mean, it's pretty uncommon, I think, for parents who have not experienced trauma of some kind. And our parents experienced their own traumas as well. And how did you see that play out in your family? How did that dynamic show up?   Iris Chen 11:46 Well, I think as a child, we don't really unpack that, because we don't know what our parents’ traumas are. Right? So all we're reacting to is how they're treating us. And so yeah, but as I got older, as I became a parent...

Parents - worried about their child's lack of maturity or ability to 'fit in' in a classroom environment - often ask me whether they should hold their child back a year before entering kindergarten or first grade.  In this episode I review the origins of the redshirting phenomenon (which lie in Malcolm Gladwell's book Outliers, and which statisticians say contained some seriously dodgy math), what it means for your individual child, as well as for the rest of the children in the class so you can make an informed decision.   Jump to highlights: (01:00) Malcolm Gladwell's anecdote about the Junior League Medicine Hat Tigers and Vancouver Giants ice hockey teams that initiated the redshirting craze (02:56) Ability grouping is done in early childhood, just like in sports (03:59) Parents holding their children back from kindergarten came to be referred to as redshirting (10:20) How common is redshirting? (11:04) Boys are redshirted at a ratio of 2:1 compared to girls (12:18) The maturationist approach of why to redshirt (13:05) State support and agenda for redshirting (15:10) Teachers tendency to view a maturationist view of development. (17:16) The Maturation Hypothesis (17:36) Parents redshirt their children to give their child an advantage (20:34) Redshirting as a way to give boys age and size advantage and avoid getting bullied (27:28) Making a judgement call into what benefits mean with regards to the body of research on redshirting (29:24) The evidence of whether redshirting is beneficial (35:19) Misdiagnosis of ADHD caused by relative maturity (37:56) A year outside of school reduces the likelihood that children receive timely identifications of learning difficulties (38:35) Students with speech impairments may actually benefit from redshirting (39:22) Redshirted students may have more behavioral problems in high school (46:04) Children from higher socioeconomic status are more likely to perform well in tests in kindergarten (48:19) It’s possible that the way the teacher sees the child is what helps the child because of Labelling Theory (49:46) Opportunity hoarding associated with middle-class, White parents. (52:01) Is kindergarten truly the new first grade? (56:06) Advocating for Developmentally Appropriate Practice or DAP (57:35) Almost everyone agrees that retention has negative impacts on children (58:55) Accumulative Advantage (01:00:07) Malcolm Gladwell’s proposed solution to homogenize and my thoughts on it (01:02:32) Summary (01:04:56) Why I think asking "should I redshirt my child" is the wrong question   Books and Resources: Outliers: The Story of Success, by Malcolm Gladwell 13 Reasons Why Your Child Won’t Listen to You and What to do About Each One School Can Wait, by Raymond S. Moore and Dorothy N. Moore   Links: 085: White privilege in schools 086: Playing to Win: How does playing sports impact children? 117: Socialization and Pandemic Pods   Join our the YPM Facebook Community: Your Parenting Mojo Facebook Group   [accordion] [accordion-item title="Click here to read the full transcript"] Jen  00:02 Hi, I'm Jen and I host the Your Parenting Mojo Podcast. We all want our children to lead fulfilling lives, but it can be so hard to keep up with the latest scientific research on child development and figure out whether and how to incorporate it into our own approach to parenting. Here at Your Parenting Mojo, I do the work for you by critically examining strategies and tools related to parenting and child development that are grounded in scientific research and principles of respectful parenting.   Jen  00:29 If you'd like to be notified when new episodes are released, and get a FREE guide called 13 Reasons Why Your Child Won't Listen to You and What to do About Each One, just head over to YourParentingMojo.com/SUBSCRIBE. You can also continue the conversation about the show with other listeners and the Your Parenting Mojo Facebook group.   Jen  00:48 I do hope you'll join us.   Jen  01:00 Hello and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast.  We have an odd person to thank for what has turned into a bit of an epic episode, and that’s Malcolm Gladwell.  His 2011 book Outliers: The story of success opens with an anecdote about the junior league Medicine Hat Tigers and Vancouver Giants ice hockey teams.  The point of the book is to demonstrate that personal explanations of success that draw on a narrative of self-made brilliance have a lot more to them – that successful people are the beneficiaries of hidden advantages and opportunities that help to give them a leg up in a way that isn’t open to most of us.  In the example of the ice hockey teams in the book (which we’re calling ice hockey for my English listeners, to distinguish it from actual hockey, which is played on a grass field), Paula Barnsley, who is the wife of psychologist Dr. Roger Barnsley, noticed during a game that the majority of the players on teams just like the Medicine Hat Tigers and Vancouver Giants had birthdays that clustered in a certain way.  Roger Barnsley went home and researched all the junior league players he could, and then the national league, and found that in any elite group of ice hockey players, 40% of the plyers will have been born between January and March, 30% between April and June, and 20% between October and December (Gladwell doesn’t say what happened to the 10% born between July and September).  Barnsley said that “In all my years in psychology I have never run into an effect this large.  You don’t even need to do any statistical analysis.  You just look at it.”   Jen  02:28 The reason for this is that the eligibility cutoff for age class hockey is January 1, which means that children born at on January 2nd are a whole year older than children born on December 31st, which is a large proportion of a young child’s life.  The same effect replicates in baseball and football (which I refuse to call “soccer”), because these also have similar age cutoffs in youth sports.   Jen  02:56 Then there’s a half page of text that really caught parents’ ears – reference to a study by two economists who looked at the relationship between scores on a standardized test, and the child’s age at the time of taking the test, and the effect was found here as well.  One of the authors of that paper, Dr. Elizabeth Dhuey, was quoted as saying “Just like in sports, we do ability grouping early on in childhood…so, early on, if we look at young kids, in kindergarten and first grade, the teachers are confusing maturity with ability.  And they put the older kids in the advanced stream, where they learn better skills; and the next year, because they are in the higher groups, they do even better; and the next year, the same things happen, and they do even better again.”  Dr. Dhuey subsequently looked at college students and found that students belonging to the relatively youngest group in their class are underrepresented by about 11.6%.  Gladwell concludes: “That initial difference in maturity doesn’t go away with time. It persists. And for thousands of students, that initial disadvantage is the difference between going to college – and having a real shot at the middle class – and not.”   Jen  03:59 Now those words are almost guaranteed to strike fear into the heart of parents, even though the real problem here is the perception that college is the only path to “having a real shot at the middle class,” who responded by holding their children back from kindergarten when their birthdays were within the last few months of the kindergarten eligibility cutoff.  In the U.S., this practice came to be known as redshirting, which is a term borrowed from sports.  In college athletics, which is big business in the U.S., athletes are only allowed to play for four years but they might ‘redshirt’ the first year which means they wouldn’t formally participate in competition while they get bigger and stronger.  Then they can still play four years after that.  But they’re not just sitting out in that year; they’re practicing with the team and getting bigger and stronger, and they wear a red shirt in practice to indicate that they’re in redshirt status.  From what I’ve read on Wikipedia a coach can tell you at the beginning of the year that you’re redshirting but it isn’t confirmed until the end of the season, so if the star quarterback gets injured then the redshirted player can give up their redshirt status and still play.  So that aspect doesn’t come into play in the academic setting, but the practice of holding a child out of kindergarten for the year when they are technically eligible to attend has become widely referred to as redshirting, and that’s what we’re going to discuss today.   Jen  05:11 In some ways this was a very easy episode to research, and in other ways it was incredibly difficult.  We’re going to aim to answer a series of questions:   Jen  05:20 How common is redshirting?   Jen  05:22 Who does it and why do they do it?   Jen  05:24 What are the benefits of red shirting and who realizes those benefits?   Jen  05:28 And if someone benefits, who is on the other end of the stick and misses out?   Jen  05:33 And then in conclusion, what does the preponderance of the evidence indicate about whether we should redshirt our children or not?   Jen  05:39 Now before we get going on these interesting and important topics, I do want to take a slight detour here to make sure we're all together and understanding the kinds of data and analysis that we're working with here. In many ways, this episode was an incredible relief to research because there's been a lot of interest in the topic, so papers were really easy to find, and the majority of them are based on State-level or National-level datasets.   Jen  06:02 So often on the show, I have to caveat the findings by saying, "Well, now I do have to warn you this study is based on what five White people in Chicago told a researcher." or "This study is based on 100 college students who receive course credit for participating." Here, our datasets are amazing. There are a couple of qualitative studies where researchers are interviewing just a few people, but these add a richness to the quantitative data that would otherwise be missing. The majority of the data sets are produced by State-level records of children's birth and enrollment in school and standardized test scores with some National-level data produced in the same ways as well, combined with National-level surveys of teachers. Researchers using this data are trying to find out what happens under normal conditions when nothing is being manipulated and find correlations between things they think are related. Of course, the problem with correlational data is we can't be sure that just because the two factors vary together that one causes the other. For example, we can find data showing that as seatbelt usage increased in cars in the 1990s, that far fewer astronauts died in spacecraft. So should we try to save astronauts life by putting on our seatbelt, maybe not.   Jen  07:08 And then sometimes States do things like change the cutoff date for kindergarten entry, and that creates what researchers call quasi-experimental data. And we can see what happens when conditions change, and people aren't allowed to do something that they could have chosen to do in the past. And this can help us to get a bit closer to a Cause-and-Effect relationship. Although these effects may not be generalizable outside the area where the experiment happened. But we do have to be a little bit careful with big data sets. One of these issues doesn't apply so much to us, which is the problem of having a sample size that doesn't accurately reflect the population. There's a nice example in one of the papers and the references about a survey of 2.4 million people, which indicated that Governor Alfred Landon of Kansas would win the 1936 election by a landslide. Now you've heard of President Landon, right? If not, that's because the incumbent, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, won 46 of the then 48 States. The magazine that ran the poll surveyed its own readers who skewed towards supporting Governor Landon, so the poll respondents didn't accurately reflect the actual population it was trying to measure.   Jen  08:13 In the State-level data, it's possible the results wouldn't be generalizable to populations outside the State, but they do include the vast, vast majority of students inside the State. They might exclude students who opted out of standardized testing, for example, but we have a number of National-level data sets as well, and these National-level data sets don't necessarily include every child in the country, but they are specifically designed to be representative. So, our data sets are often fully representative of the population, and when they're not, these are very large data sets designed to be nationally representative.   Jen  08:47 And the second thing to be aware of when you're looking at working with large data sets is differences between the two conditions you're studying can look statistically significant very easily. You could get a result with a State or National-level data set, that's statistically significant at p = 0.05, which is the generally accepted standard, but which has an effect size that's tiny and inconsequential to your life. And I always think back to research on tantrums on this topic, which might find that parents who take a certain action when their child's having a tantrum can achieve a statistically significant reduction in the frequency of tantrums their child has. Doesn't that sound amazing? Well, it ends up being a reduction from something like 15 to 14 tantrums a day. Is that change meaningful in a parent's life? No, it is not.   Jen  09:33 And so one final thing to be aware of in this data is that it isn't always super current. Even when I restrict my searches to papers published in the last five years, the data they often use is far older, especially when you're looking at long term effects. You have to look at data from when children were in school 20 years ago, so we can't be sure that educational methods use then are comparable to what's used today. We'll come back to the idea of there being more standardized testing now than there was in the past even in kindergarten, so the educational conditions that were in place when children were redshirted 20 years ago, and they're experiencing certain outcomes now are no longer in place for your child to experience. So a study might find that children who attended kindergarten on time in the 1980s had better lifetime outcomes, but the kind of kindergarten those children attended doesn't exist anymore.   Jen  10:20 All right, so now we're all square on that. Our first question, How common is red shirting is actually excitingly easy to answer. A pretty good conservative estimate came up with a US national average prevalence rate of four to five and a half percent, which in a way makes us wonder why are we even doing a whole episode on it if it's just a small percentage of people that this affects. But the national average conceals considerable variation within specific schools and demographics. In one fifth of schools that serve primarily families of high socioeconomic status, redshirting rates can be as high as 15% of all children, which translates to 60% of children being born within the three months before the cutoff for kindergarten entry being redshirted.   Jen  11:04 All right on to our next question. Who redshirts and why do they do it? Nearly 6% of White children redshirt. But fewer than 1% of Black children do. About 2% of Hispanic and 2.7% of Asian children redshirt. About 2.3% of children in the lowest socio-economic status quintile redshirt compared to 6.4% of children in the highest quintile. Boys are held back in far larger numbers than girls by a ratio of about two to one. The most surprising finding about redshirting rates occurred after North Carolina adjusted its cutoff date to enter kindergarten from October 16 to September 1 in 2006 - we're going to come back to the data on this study pretty often - and the rate of redshirting essentially went to nil. The authors of that study say that these findings suggest that children's absolute age rather than age relative to classmates plays a dominant role in the decision to redshirt.   Jen  11:58 Children who had been born in October would have previously been considered for redshirting, but the authors wondered, "Well did parents of August-born children just start redshirting instead? And it turned out they didn't. For reasons the authors didn't seem to be able to explain. And the rate of redshirting for children born between September 1 and October 16, was close to zero.   Jen  12:18 So why do parents redshirt their children? While allowing children's absolute age to increase before they enter school is one reason which is based on the idea that children need to be mature enough when they enter school to be successful primarily because this increases children's attention spans, their tolerance for seated instruction, and it improves their behavior. This approach to looking at redshirting has been around since the 1960s and 70s, when researchers at the Gesell Institute argued that children should be entered in school grouped and promoted on the basis of their developmental or behavioral age, not on the basis of their chronological age or IQ. The book School Can Wait was published in 1979 and perhaps this accounts for the fairly large number of parents of my generation who were surveyed about their decision to redshirt their child who report having been redshirted themselves.   Jen  13:04 In addition to popular books, there was quite a bit of enthusiasm for redshirting expressed in journal articles in this period. Like this statement from a paper in the journal education: "Redshirting is a program that can be applied at any level of the educational system nationwide, statewide district-wide or in an individual classroom

In this short ad hoc episode that was originally recorded as a Facebook Live, I discuss ways that my family is working on dismantling both White supremacy and patriarchy (and having a go at capitalism while we're at it!) this Martin Luther King Jr. Day holiday weekend. The best part is that this doesn't have to be heavy work that brings with it a huge sense of guilt. It's about building community that lifts all of us up, and gets us out of the 'stay in my lane' mindset that White supremacy uses to keep us in line. And it also doesn't have to happen only on the holiday itself - this work is just as relevant and important the rest of the year. Prefer to watch rather than listen? Click here to join the free YPM Facebook group and watch the video recording of the episode   [accordion] [accordion-item title="Click here to read the full transcript"] Jen Lumanlan 00:01 Hello, everyone, it's Jen. And I just wanted to do another live episode as it were in the free Your Parenting Mojo Facebook group because I did one recently for the events after the US Capitol siege. And responding to that, and actually looked at the analytics on it and found that it was one of my most recently downloaded episodes. So, this is sort of just another informal episode. And we'll be back to regular programming next week, but wanted to share some thoughts on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, which is today here in the US. And I think this is actually the special—the first holiday recorded an episode that I've done ever. So it feels kind of cool to be doing it for this particular day for Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. And I wanted to share some thoughts that actually I concepted on a bike ride, which tends to be how these things come about when I have some time to think. And I'm really sort of thinking, “Okay, what is it that parents need to know in this right now? What's important about continuing Dr. King's legacy?” And I talked in the episode from last week about the events in the US Capitol, about the anti-racist work that we're doing, and that is so necessary that has to continue, yes, we have to keep doing that. We also need to do things like learning about the achievements of Black people, both in history and today. And at all that I really enjoy for that is, if you're not watching on Facebook Live, I'm holding up these Black history flashcards. They're published by an organization called Urban intellectuals, which I believe is a Black-owned company. And we've actually been storing them in a little teacup on our dining room table, and my daughter will request that we go through at least one and up to three of them, I draw the line at three because then I don't get to eat dinner at the dinner table every day. And we talk through not just sort of the what are the bullet points on the back of the card that each of these individuals on the cards did.   Jen Lumanlan 01:55 But what does it mean? What does it mean that to say that they were entrepreneurs, trappers, and traders in the 1700s is one of the people that we read about last night was what kind of circumstances came into place to even make that possible when the vast majority of Black people in that period who were over in the Americas were enslaved. What kind of circumstances and personality and situation were involved in this? And so I think that that is really helping us to put some kind of context around. It's not just that there were millions of Black people here in the US, and they were all enslaved, and they were sort of this monolithic entity. But these were individual people who had individual lives and individual concerns, and they made incredibly valued and undervalued contributions to our culture, you know, inventing things and setting up one of the people we read about last night set up the city of Chicago, he founded a settlement that turned into the city of Chicago, the leaders, former leader of Kenya and Ghana, who negotiated independence from the UK. And so obviously, that focus is very much on history. And we also need to be talking about the work that Black people and other people of color are doing on an ongoing basis today. But it's just sort of an additional way that we are making this because of sort of baking these ideas into the fabric of our everyday lives.   Jen Lumanlan 03:18 And then, yes, we need to do our overtly anti-racist work, we need to be talking with our children about these ideas that don't just leave them with the impression that Black people were victimized and victims of their circumstances that they had agency in their lives and continue to have agency in their lives. And don't need rescuing. They don't need us to come and save them, they can tell us what they need and we should be listening to that. But I think it goes even deeper than that because I'm not sure that many of us myself absolutely included, fully understand the ways that White supremacy and patriarchy, and even capitalism show up in our lives. And so we've discussed before on the show, the interview with Dr. Carol Gilligan, and a bunch of times since then, in a variety of other episodes, about how patriarchy operates and how that shows up in ourselves. And one of the ways it does that is through creating separation, both within ourselves and between individuals. And so it separates, it crazy separation in ourselves by setting up these sort of arbitrarily masculine and arbitrarily feminine qualities. So masculine qualities might be things like logic and reason and, and assertiveness and confidence and all these things you stereotypically associate with men.   Jen Lumanlan 04:39 And then the feminine categories might be things like intimacy and tenderness, and unconditional love, and sort of the soft, feminine sides. And of course, the point here is that we all have all of these characteristics. There's nothing inherently masculine or feminine about any of them, but by dividing them, we're able to privilege one set, we're able to privilege the masculine set and say, Well, this is what we should be working towards, which is why we tell our girls that they should go and do STEM careers and, and exceed in traditionally male-dominated fields. But we don't tell either our girls or boys that yeah, it's okay to care about other people, it's okay to be in caring professions, and to want to have that be your life's work. So there's that sort of split within ourselves, but it also separates individuals by, in a way sort of policing our behavior and telling us what's acceptable and what isn't. And one of the ways it does that is by making it really difficult to ask for help, or even to offer help. And because we're all supposed to project this image of, “Well, I've got it together, everything's fine. There's no problem here, things are under control.” And if that's not the case, for any reason, then we can always buy something to help us fix that circumstance, like, we can buy a service, like a cleaner or somebody to outsource a part of the work that we're feeling is not in control too.   Jen Lumanlan 06:07 And so it's not even okay to offer help, I think, because that sort of breaks down the idea that the person you're offering to has it all together. And even if we offer, then the person sort of supposed to say, “Well, yeah, I'm okay, thanks, everything's fine, I don't really know of anything you can do.” And then we as the offer are sort of just supposed to stay in our lane and let it go. And I think the reason for this is that we are under a patriarchal White supremacist capitalist culture. We're not supposed to have this true sense of kind of community, because if we had that, we wouldn't need to buy as much stuff. Because we would just help each other out. And so there wouldn't be this need to just buy stuff to fill the gaps that that we have in our lives because we aren't able to be in true community. For example, my neighbor is running down to the store the other night, she was going already, and she lean down the car window on the way pass and she said, “Do you need anything?” And I had just been to the store early that day. And forgotten to get yogurt and said, “Hey, would you mind get me a quarter yogurt?” And so I didn't need to call down to Instacart. I didn't need to go down to the store again, myself. It was just a simple, you know, do you need anything, and me saying yes, rather than, “Well, I don't want to burden her or, you know, I don't want to go upstairs and get money right now.” And of course, when you do this often enough, the money can just kind of flow back and forth and it becomes less of a big deal. But she offered help. And I said, “Yeah,” in that moment, I would love to have some help. Thank you very much.   Jen Lumanlan 07:41 And so this holiday weekend, one of the things that I'm focusing on most closely, and I think my focus sort of shifts every year as I learn more, and I feel like my the ideas that I want to look at change. So for this year, what I'm doing right now is taking steps to reach out to my community, and specifically a community that was right around me. And so, I emailed the listener for all the people who live on our street. And I told them about all the things that my daughter Carys is interested in, which currently includes salamanders and invertebrates and fungi that are popping up around our neighborhood when it sometimes rains, not so often as it should be at the moment. And asking for their help and finding these things. And so we immediately got inundated with information like, “Is she interested in spiders?” “Oh, I have some orange fungi in my yard. I'll try and remember to bring them over.” We had one neighbor who said, “Hey, can we do a trade? I have a photography assignment for a class that I'm doing. And I have to photograph children expressing various different emotions.” Of course, your daughter is welcome to come and look in my yard whenever she likes but could we also do this trade where I get to photograph her and fulfill this goal for my assignment? And so we went over there and Carys got to turn over every rock in my neighbor’s back yard. And my neighbor was just fascinated by by watching this and how curious Carys is about all this stuff.   Jen Lumanlan 09:02 And I got to talk with his neighbor who is probably four doors down the street from me whom I've seen in passing, I knew her name before, but I had no idea about the things that are important to her and what she spent her life doing. And we were able to deepen that connection just because of that simple email that I had sent out that I wasn't even offering anything in particular, you know, yes, I had also added something to the button to say you know, if your kids are homeschooling or interested in anything at all that we might be able to help with feel free to reach out. But she just said hey, you know this, this is relevant to me. I'd love to be able to get some help with this. This is relevant to you. Can we work together? And yes, it was. It was a really lovely way to spend a couple of hours in the afternoon. Another way that we're doing this is by getting closer to our neighbors and actually proposed a meal-sharing arrangement with them where we would cook an extra meal one night a week and then give it to them, and they would cook an extra meal one night a week and give it to us. And so, it's literally almost no extra work. It's like 5% extra work. And it gets the other family a night off from cooking. Jen Lumanlan 10:09 Another thing that I'm also doing with my neighbors is that they have two kids who are in school, in zoom school most of the day, so they're not available in the mornings. But in the afternoons, they are basically running around the house and both parents are trying to work from home and get stuff done. And of course, I'm working from home too. And what I've finally realized is I can give up the illusion of feeling like I need to be shut away in a room to get work done. And rather than be interrupted every 15 minutes with my daughter who would literally walk past my husband to come down to the room where I'm working and ask for a snack, rather than have that continual interruption. I can actually work more effectively if I put a deck chair out in the driveway and sit sometimes bundled up in a lot of down jackets in the sun, in the winter. And Carys is playing with their kids and they're kind of running in between the two gardens wearing masks and looking for salamanders, exchanging rocks, bouncing a ball around, and just doing things that basically keep themselves entertained. And yes, I'm not in a quiet room. And now I couldn't do it on a day when I had a lot of calls, but it's it takes so much pressure off my neighbor who now doesn't have to worry every minute about what our kids are getting into, why it's quiet in the living room, and that she knows that they are having fun interactions. And it's basically no more work for me either. And so, I think that that is really sort of deepening our connections to each other as well.   Jen Lumanlan 11:38 One more example, I was out in the street yesterday morning, and our neighbors announced he was going to the store and renting a rug cleaner. And I thought, “Oh, thank goodness. Carys had actually peed on a rug by accident six months ago,” and we couldn't get the smell out. It's been rolled up; I haven't been able to get to the store to get a rug cleaning myself. I said, “Hey, can we go in on that with you? Can I just pay you half of the rental cost? And we'll use it for 15 minutes to try and get the smell out of this rug?” And he's like, “Sure, of course, why not.” And so I didn't have to go to the store and get the thing, which is the thing that's been holding me back for the last six months, he got a bit of help on the rental cost and was happy to help out. And again, we deepen the sense that if you ask for help, other people are more likely to ask us back, because they sort of in the beginning it kind of feel like well, I don't want to ask them, they never asked me for anything. And so I don't feel like I want to ask them. But if we put that first handout and say, “Hey, can I ask for your help with something?” Then they are much more likely to come back around when they need something. And that's what builds our sense of community. So yes, we can also offer to help people of course, particularly on a day like today, when we're thinking about what is our impact on the world. How do we want to leave our mark on this world? What are some of the ways that this is truly meaningful for you? Maybe helping scientists to catalog plant and animal species, that's one of the things we're going to be doing in a BioBlitz.   Jen Lumanlan 13:16 Where we're helping scientists understand what species we're finding in our neighborhood. Maybe we have a bit of a platform inside the company that we work for, and that we can use that to ask for change for things that seem really meaningful right now, and that you see that need to happen. Maybe like my neighbor, the photography friend, who we just met yesterday, properly is going out to protests at the invitation of the organizers and taking photographs of protests that are happening, and then giving them the images and donating them so that the organizations can use these images in their marketing materials and on their websites. And so they get high-quality images and my friend gets to feel as though her unique skills and talents are actively contributing, you know, yes, she could just show up to the protest. But she's going one step beyond that to share the unique skills and talents that she brings to the world. So the one thing I do want to say about this is if we do live in heavily segregated communities, as many of us do, it can focus on our very local communities and can end up hoarding resources. And that's one of the issues that I have with the Buy Nothing groups, particularly the ones that require that you live in a certain area to be a part of them. Because what that ends up doing is saying, “Well, you know, they all if all the people in my neighborhood are relatively well advantaged, we're only going to trade stuff within my neighborhood.” And that just ends up sort of hoarding and consolidating the resources available in that community is the people in that community to trade all of their expensive equipment. And people in a very different community have access to very different resources.   Jen Lumanlan 14:47 So I don't think that this focus on your tight local community is the only answer. But let's do these things in parallel. Let's do a bit of this and let's also do some reaching across community lines. Let's continue our anti-racist work. Let’s continue the conversations we're having with our children. Let's build our communities up on a variety of different scales, as we are working to dismantle the old systems. So I really hope that you'll join me in this work. I would love to hear about what it is you do as a resource for your community and also this so you're thinking about ways that you're going to be offering help to the community, but also, how are you going to ask for help from your community? What is it that you can identify that's like, “Oh, I'm going away for the weekend and the trash cans need to be out Monday morning, could I ask somebody to help put my trash cans out?” Just some tiny little thing like that gets you in conversation with your neighbors gets you on a different level of interaction than just saying hi, that you are offering something or asking for something, and that that will make it more likely that they will do the same in return. And that's how we build community.   Jen Lumanlan 15:57 So, thank you so much for joining me for this. We're gonna be back to regular episodes next week, and our episode for next week will be on red-shirting, whether or not you should red-shirt your child. It was actually one that I wrote over the holidays and it was a very, very in-depth episode. And of course, there are lots of connections to social justice issues related to whether or not you should hold your child back from kindergarten for a year, which is what we mean by red-shirting for those of you who are outside the US. So stay tuned for that lots more research-based information coming as usual, but I just wanted to share these thoughts with you and not let this holiday go by without sort of offering something to maybe help us all a little bit. Just move the needle, just move the needle a tiny bit in our local communities, and also much broader than that as well. So thanks so much for joining me and I will see you again soon.   [/accordion-item] [/accordion]

In this ad hoc episode, I outline a response to the U.S. Capitol siege.  I provide some suggestions for ways to talk with your child about the events, but also ask that you take two more steps: (1) examine your own role in these events, even if you condemn them yourself (as I do); (2) take action based on your own position and role in the world to work toward equality. You can find my resources on the intersection of parenting and race here. There's a specific blog post suggesting a script for talking with children about the Black Lives Matter movement (which could be adapted for this situation) here. Showing Up for Racial Justice's Action Hours are here   [accordion] [accordion-item title="Click here to read the full transcript"] Jen Lumanlan  00:01 Hello, everybody! I am recording live in our Facebook group. And I'm also recording this separately on the camera and on audio only as a way to share this information more broadly across a variety of platforms. I thought it was actually sharing in the group a minute ago, and I am not sure that it was working so I'm just trying to give this another go around. And I think actually, I just got the same message pop up saying that I was not sharing and now I am sharing, so hopefully this is going through to everywhere that it's supposed to be going. So the content of what I want to talk about today is about what has happened at the US Capitol. And it's been a couple of days, it's Friday, today, January 8, and two days after the events happened at the Capitol. And I wasn't really sure what to say and so I didn't want to say anything, I didn't want to say the wrong thing. And I went out for a bike ride this morning and it sort of clarified for me what it was that I wanted to say. And so that's why if you're watching this on video, you're probably seeing a bit of a stripe across my forehead and I'm freshly showered because I kind of came back and was on fire about what it was that I wanted to say. And so you're sort of hearing my relatively raw unedited thoughts. And I'm a little nervous about sharing those with you which is why you probably hear this in my voice. So I want to start with talking with our children about the events that have happened at the Capitol, because I'm hearing questions in Facebook groups and other places online if parents want to have these kinds of conversations with their children, but they don't know how to do it or they're thinking, okay, maybe my children are too young to understand what's going on and I don't want to scare them, and I'm not sure if I'm going to have a conversation with them at all.   Jen Lumanlan  01:57 And so, I have published resources on this before I actually have a post on how to talk with your child about Black Lives Matter. And I think that a lot of the principles that are discussed in there are very similar. And we want to do it in an age-appropriate way, we want to lead with their questions, and so I think ideally, this will come from them being out in the world, and they'll see things that they're curious about, and they'll ask about them, and that will lead into a conversation on these topics. But if we are not out so much lately, as many of us are not and maybe we don't have the news on all the time, and so their exposure to it may be much less than it otherwise would have been. And so well, what can we do when that's the case? And we're not sure how to bring the conversation up? Well, I would say the first thing we can do is to talk about it with a spouse or significant other or another adult over dinner, or over some other period of time where it's natural for you to have a conversation. And to just talk about what's on your mind—what's been in the news today? how is today's developments casting new light on? what we're thinking about what happened at the US Capitol? And pretty soon your child is probably going to say, “What are you talking about?” Or something that indicates that they're interested in this topic and I think that that can be a jumping-off point for you to try and give some background and ideally, that this won't be the first conversation that you will have had on current events like this, and you'll be able to talk about in context, Donald Trump and the policies that he has been enacting, and the ways that he talks to people, and whom he talks to. And so, that will provide you with the context that you need to then describe what has happened.     Jen Lumanlan  03:46 When they have questions, we can answer their questions clearly and directly. And also not be afraid to say when we don't know, because there's a lot that we don't know. And we don't have to put across the impression that we do know everything to our children all the time. I think it's also fine to share how we feel about the events with our children. It's important for them to see that our words and what we're saying match our demeanor, if we are clearly afraid about something, but we're sort of saying, “Oh, don't worry about it, it's fine,” then what they're learning from that is well, “I can see that my parent is not fine, but they're telling me fine. They're telling me everything's fine. Something really important is going on here,” or they may see, “Well, I just don't trust my own ability to judge how other people are reacting because I'm getting these mixed messages and I don't understand which one to prioritize. It must be what my parent is saying. And so I must not be capable of judging how their nonverbal reactions are supporting that message.” And so, I think behind a lot of these questions around what should I talk to my child, what should I say to my child, there's this big issue of privilege and of having the luxury to make that decision and to decide what we're going to say and to be able to make a decision to choose to say things that don't scare our children. And not all parents have the luxury to do this. So, if you're coming at these conversations for the first time, then welcome. There are resources that I've published available to help you there, a number of them are collected at yourparenting mojo.com/race. There's actually one on how to talk with your child about Black Lives Matter and I think that a number of the principles that are discussed in that post are also very applicable here. And the kind of script that you can use to build on their questions will also be helpful as you're navigating this kind of conversation.   Jen Lumanlan  05:50 So, that's the issue of talking with our children about this topic, but I think that there's a broader issue that I want to make sure isn't neglected. Because I think it's really critical to examine what is our role in this system, in the system that has made it feel to some people like Donald Trump is the best option who's available to me, and what he says is what I'm going to do. Because I think that it's really easy to point to those people and say, “Well, those people are racist, and I'm not like them, and it's all their fault, their problem,” and instead, I think that we all need to examine our role in the system that has created these events and to take action related to that. And so what does that mean? Well, I worked for a consulting company for a long time. And I worked in sustainability consulting for a number of years, which I really enjoyed, but it became apparent that there was a point in time where it was obvious people, companies were not willing to pay the premiums that my company wanted to sell this work for. And so, I was on the verge of getting laid off and an executive that I'd worked with previously, who appreciated my work said, “You should come to work on my team,” and I said, “Sure.” And so, we were in a portion of the business where we were selling outsourcing services and other things as well, technology implementation, but we were also selling outsourcing services. And so what I was essentially doing was supporting proposal development work, and so directly involved in selling the company's services related to outsourcing in countries like India and the Philippines, which would take jobs away from American citizens and outsource them to those companies where it's cheaper to operate.   Jen Lumanlan  07:59 And I remember reading in the news several years ago now that my company would force the American workers to train their new replacements on their jobs as a condition of receiving severance pay. And so, you know, I don't want to point to you and say, “You are the problem, you listeners, you watchers are the problem,” because we are all part of this problem. I was selling work that was taking jobs away from people who are many of them now are supporting Donald Trump, and sending that to other countries. And of course, there's a lot of complexity involved here, maybe I was involved in lifting the standard of living for somebody who was in those countries. It's not cut and dry. But I am not uninvolved in this system and neither are you. No matter where you sit in life, you have a role to play in this system. So maybe you're a teacher, and you participate in systems that involve awarding points for children who are reading books, and so that they can collect points and win rewards for reading books, as they're learning how to read. Well, what does that do? It pits children against each other, and it directly undermines the kind of cooperative systems that children from many other cultures learn at home and says that the way of being that you've learned in your culture is not valued here, competition is valued here. And if you want to do well, if you want to get ahead, then you need to get on board with that competitive approach. If you are teaching at any level at all, have you evaluated your curriculum through an anti-racist lens? You know, even if you're at the university level, are you looking at the contributions that Black people have made in your field? And are you teaching that alongside all of the contributions that the much better-known White inventors, scientists, and whoever has made in that field? If you're in government, how are the policies that you are creating, helping to perpetuate the system? Or how are they helping to break those systems down? If you're in business, does your business incorporate anti-racist principles? Are you actively working to lift up all people? I will say that I have been searching for a number of months now for a consulting company to help me look at embedding anti-racist principles into my business.   Jen Lumanlan  10:33 So, if you're watching this, and you work for somebody who does this, or you know of a company that does this, I know there are many companies that do it for multinational businesses. I am not aware of anyone who is yet doing it on a very small scale. I'm very interested in piloting something around that if somebody wants to develop an offering that can be taken to many small businesses. So this work needs to continue, even though I'm no longer working at the consulting company, it still needs to continue within my own business. If you don't work outside of the home, if your work involves raising children, then you still play a role. If your child is in daycare, or school, or preschool, where whatever situation they're in how do you advocate for resources for your child? Do you look at policies at your preschool daycare school? And look at those through the lens of well, “How does this benefit me? And how does this withhold benefits from other people?” Does this level the playing field? Does it help to lift up a group that has historically not been able to access resources as well as the group that I'm a member of has been able to? Does your child come home after the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr, holiday? And I think that well, he made a speech about having a dream and there was this woman called Rosa Parks, and she sat on a bus and now we're good. Racism isn't a problem anymore. If your child is coming home with that kind of message, then there's some work to do here.   Jen Lumanlan  12:06 And I would say if you're listening to this and thinking, “Well, that sounds exhausting to look at everything I do through that lens,” then I would say, “Yeah, maybe it can seem like some extra effort.” But it's not as much effort as being on the other end of these principles that are actively working against your existence, your right to exist in this world. And it is our responsibility as parents who have more privilege to examine our role in this system and to take steps to, break that system down to the extent that we can within our particular role in it. And so, I also want to link this idea to patriarchy, because I think that it's all connected. It's all connected because patriarchy does three things. Firstly, it creates scarcity, it creates a scarcity of jobs, it creates a scarcity of money of resources, and then it pits people against each other to vie for those resources. So I think a lot of parents who listen to the show feel a lot of pressure to give their children the skills they need to get ahead in life and to put them in the best daycare situation, and the best school situation so that they can get a job and place it in an elite university, and get a job from there at a White collar consulting company that I used to work for, or an investment banking firm or something along those lines. And that when we're doing those things, we are contributing to the perpetuation of this system that we're not seeing that this scarcity is in many ways artificially created as a way to keep us working against each other instead of working with each other. And that's sort of a separate, the second thing that patriarchy does creating separation, it makes us say, “Well, we're different from them and I want those resources, I need my child to go to an elite university so that they can get ahead and have a better life than I had. And there isn't enough stuff for me and my family to have it and for them and their family to have it and I need to make sure that my family has it, so I'm going to do everything I can for my child to get that and for their child to not get that.”   Jen Lumanlan  12:06 And we may sort of have this veneer of well, everything's equal and everybody's the same, but at the end of the day, if we are advocating for resources that benefit our child in the way that they do not benefit all other children, then we are part of this system that is perpetuating this problem. And then finally patriarchy creates powerlessness. And I think this is sort of a hypothesis of mine, but we see that people who are supporting Donald Trump are angry. And anger is always something that conceals other things underneath it, anger is never the only thing that's going on. And very often what anger conceals is a sense of fear, and maybe a sense of shame. And that the people who are angry are scared underneath all of this, they're scared that they won't be able to feed their family or whatever it is that’s going on for them. And because we have these other elements of patriarchy we're being pitted against each other, they are seeing well, if those people are being lifted up, then by default, I am not being lifted up and I need more, and we can't both have more. SoI think that, for some parents who are listening to this, they may be thinking, well, you know, all of this is politics. It's all stuff that's going out in the on out there in the world and this is not really connected to parenting, and that somebody who's talking about parenting doesn't have any business talking about politics. When I am coming to a certain place to get information about parenting, I want to just be able to get information about parenting and not have to deal with all the political stuff.     Jen Lumanlan  16:25 And to do those parents, I would say, “Okay, there's plenty of places where you can get that,” and increasingly, that is not going to be here in the Your Parenting Mojo community because this is directly connected to parenting. Adults use force to resolve conflicts that they're having because they learn this from their parents. And if you're thinking, “Well, I don't use force, I don't spank my kid. I'm not doing those things,” then I would say, okay, then we need to take a closer look at what's going on. And again, I'm not pointing fingers at you here, I'm saying this is all of us. This is me included. You know, sometimes we will sugarcoat our force, popular parenting advice says, “If your child is being difficult, and can't choose between what they're getting, you know, on the suite of options of what they're going to wear in the morning, then you give them two choices that you can live with both of them and that's what they get to choose between, or you have to brush your teeth, but we can use the pink toothbrush or the blue toothbrush. And at the end of the day, we're still applying force here, we're still saying, you're going to do this, you are getting dressed. And I'm going to make it seem like you have some choice by allowing you to pick between these two options and I think that's a really key idea here, that if you are allowing the child to pick, then that's not really choices. The same as in school, where you're allowed to pick between two assignments, the teacher is determined are acceptable, but you don't actually get a choice in terms of what you're learning. And we do this all the time, and I think it was in a conversation I had with Hannah and Kelsey on the upbringing podcast, where they were talking about having attended a Black Lives Matter protest, and you know, everybody there is saying, fight the power, fight the power and then they're getting home, and it's time for the kids to go to bed and saying, “Well, you're gonna brush your teeth now,” and so if you're sort of in public having this fight the power message, but at home, you're then forcing your child to do things against their will, then we are still perpetuating this same approach, we're still saying, “I don't care about how you how you feel about this.”   Jen Lumanlan  18:51 We may even be early in the stage of working through sort of a more peaceful parenting approach. And we know that we're supposed to hear our children and we're supposed to validate their feelings. And then so often, what I see is the parents will then jump to a solution and say, “Well, this is what we're going to do. I hear that you're frustrated and this is how we're going to do it,” and so then they wonder, well, a lot of times questions will come up around, well, my child won't engage in problem-solving with me, and they just walk away or they just say on and on and on I'm not listening or I just don't care or something like that. And the child has learned that they have no power in this interaction, that it's going to seem like they have some power, but actually, they have no power. So I think sort of the bigger thing that I want to convey here is that we're going to be exploring these ideas more and more here on the podcast and in other places that I'm active. We're not leaving the research behind, we're still going to be taking a very research-based approach to understanding what's going on with our children, but increasingly, we're going to be questioning the system that the research sets with it, and saying, “Well, how do we know that this is even the right question to ask? How do we situate this?” And what

When parents first hear about interest-led learning (also known as self-directed education), they may wonder: why on earth would we do that?  And how would my child learn without anyone teaching them? Many parents start down this path with only an inkling of where it may end up taking them and I think this is true of our guest, Akilah Richards.  Akilah grew up in a typical Jamaican family where children were not allowed to have an opinion about anything - even their own bodies and feelings.  In her book Raising Free People, she writes that: "Respect, the way [Jamaican parents] define it, is non-negotiable, and the spectrum of things a child can do to disrespect an adult, especially a parent, is miles wide and deep.  Reverence for adults, not just respect, is expected, normalized, and deeply ingrained.  Somebody else's mama could slap you for not showing reverence to any adult.  Physical punishment for the wrong displays of emotion, even silent ones like frowns or subtle ones like deep sighs, were commonplace, expected, celebrated as one of the reasons children "turned out right."  Not only did you, as a child, dismiss any attitudes or anything adults might perceive as rudeness, your general countenance should reflect a constant respect - no space at all for showing actual emotion, if that emotion was contrary to what was reverent and pleasant for the adults in your life - again, especially your parents." While we may not have grown up with parents who were as overtly strict as this, chances are our parents and teachers used more subtle ways of keeping us in line with behavior management charts, grades (and praise for grades) and the withdrawal of approval if we were to express 'negative' emotions like frustration or anger. And of course this is linked to learning because compulsory schooling does not allow space for our children to be respected as individuals.  There may be dedicated, talented teachers within that system that respect our children and who are doing the very best they can to provide support, but they too are working within a system that does not respect them. So how could we use interest-led learning/self-directed education to support our child's intrinsic love of learning - as well as our relationship with them?  This is the central idea that we discuss in this episode.  It's a deep, enriching conversation that cuts to the heart of the relationship we want to have with our children, and I hope you enjoy it.   Get started with interest-led learning! If you'd like to learn more about the Learning membership which can help start you along the interest-led learning/self-directed education path, you can find more information here. Just click the banner.         Resources discussed during the conversation: Maleka Diggs' Eclectic Learning Network Developing a Disruptor's Ear, by Akilah Richards and Maleka Diggs Toward Radical Social Change (TRUE) community Akilah's website, Raising Free People Akilah's book, Raising Free People   [accordion] [accordion-item title="Click here to read the full transcript"] Jen  00:03 Hi, I'm Jen and I host the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. We all want our children to lead fulfilling lives, but it can be so hard to keep up with the latest scientific research on child development and figure out whether and how to incorporate it into our own approach to parenting. Here at your parenting Mojo, I do the work for you by critically examining strategies and tools related to parenting and child development that are grounded in scientific research and principles of respectful parenting. If you'd like to be notified when new episodes are released and get a free guide to seven parenting myths that we can safely leave behind seven fewer things to worry about. Subscribe to the show at yourparentingmojo.com. You can also continue the conversation about the show with other listeners in the your parenting Mojo Facebook group. I do hope you'll join us. Jen  00:59 Hello and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. A long time on the show, we were lucky enough to hear from Dr. Peter Grey on the topic of self-directed learning and how learning can possibly happen when nobody is teaching the child what to learn. That conversation was quite a popular one, and today we're going to do a long delayed follow up on this topic with Akilah Richards. Akilah is a writer, and unschooling organizer, and host of the Raising Free People podcast. She's a founding board member of the Alliance for self-directed education and the author of the new book, raising free people, unschooling as liberation and healing work. Her focus is on helping Black indigenous people of color communities, use unschooling as a tool for decolonizing learning and for liberating themselves from oppressive exclusive systems. So we'll have lots here for those members of the audience today, as well as what White folks can do to support this process and use self directed learning in a way that helps to break down tools of oppression rather than perpetuating them. During the episode, I mentioned this supporting your child's learning membership, which is currently accepting members for just a few more days until the end of December 2020. Will get you and your child started on the path of self-directed learning that we discussed in this episode. As you'll hear, so much of this work is our own work to do, rather than just making sure our child is doing the right things at the right times to make sure they're successful. So you'll get help in understanding how learning actually happens in a child's brain so that you can recognise it and gain confidence in their abilities and in your abilities to help them learn. You'll learn how to document their learning in a way that doesn't require testing and grades, but instead recognizes the learning in all of its complexity. You'll be able to scaffold their learning so you can sensitively provide just the right amount of support to help them overcome a challenge without taking over the project yourself. And you'll get guidance on supporting the development of skills like critical thinking and non-cognitive learning. Which is learning that happens in our bodies and not just in our brains. Underpinning all that is a deep respect for children's own ideas and opinions, and we listen closely to those to help us understand how to support our child's learning rather than assuming that we know what they need and then teaching it to them. So if this sounds like the kind of thing you'd like to spend time doing with your child. I encourage you to check out the membership at yourparentingmojo.com/learningmembership. It's suitable for parents with children old enough to ask questions through the end of elementary school, whether you're homeschooling, thinking about homeschooling, zoom schooling, or in school full time and looking to supplement that outside of school hours. Once again, you can find more information at yourparentingmojo.com/learningmembership. Now let's get going with our conversation. Welcome. Akilah. Akilah Richards  03:37 Thank you, Jen. I so appreciate the invitation. Jen  03:40 And so I wonder if we can start with public schools. Which I know you have some experience with and maybe you can start by telling us what you see as being, I hesitate to use the word wrong but I can't think of a better one. But, what's wrong with public schools? Why did you opt out of this system? And are there some aspects of it that you actually think work quite well? Akilah Richards  04:02 Yeah, So I feel like for the work that I do, I feel like it's less important my opinion about public school. I think, Jen, that you and I probably have a similar experience. That many people have lots of opinions about public school and they're often not so great, even with the elements of it that we love, like teachers. I think that's an element that most people love. Yeah, that's certainly been my experience like falling in love with teachers who are also trapped inside of that same system and the constructs and confines that come when we focus on results and standardization instead of personhood and ways to humanize practices. That's pretty much my spiel about public school. It doesn't feel useful to go on about the issues with it, and I also, in terms of my own story, essentially, my daughters, they were only in elementary school when we left. I began to see how much of their personhood was being compromised at the expense of student hood and I got to see that because Miley and Sage they expressed it they talked about not having time as I talked about in the book. Miley kept saying she didn't have time to think her thoughts, you know, instead they kept peopling on her because that's how it felt to be in a space where you have to like move your body a certain way, put your finger over your mouth to display quiet and to walk in the line and the these things that might seem simple and normal and maybe even good were much like lots of other things that seems simple and normal and good. Violence, acts of violence against their bodies, against their personhood,  and against their practice of consent. So essentially, that was the issue with my kids, and that's also my issue with schooling generally. Jen  05:53 Yeah, yeah. And I think a lot of parents might feel that maybe sense it and just not have the language to verbalize why they're uncomfortable with this environment that they went through. You know, I went to public school as well, and to see these incongruencies between the way that we want to raise our children and the practices that happened in school and to just not know how to reconcile that tension.  Akilah Richards  06:18 Exactly. Or even know what to do with what you know, because, for example, among Black communities in varying countries, not just the U.S thing. We know that schooling was not designed with us in mind, right? Like, it can be a form of subjugation across the board, but particularly when you talk about non-White bodies and specifically, when you talk about Black-bodies and non-Black indigenous bodies, that information is so harmful. The things that are missing on purpose repeatedly years upon years, the same stuff my mother said should have been in school when she was in school, were the same issues that I had with stuff, the same issues that you know, going on generation beyond generation. So there's also that element of people, cultures, peoples who can see what school can be but are also trapped inside what school never was and they never gonna be for some people. So that's another element of it that makes it deeply unattractive and problematic for me. Jen  07:24 Yeah, And so I don't want to spend much more time on schools, but I do want to address one question. I get a lot. I get a lot of pushback for being anti-school and I tried to respond that I'm not anti school. But the peer reviewed research that I looked at says that school is just not designed to teach children in a way that supports their learning and development. That. That from the peer-reviewed side and then all of the experiential stuff as well, that you're talking about is there as well. And so the people who are asking me these questions, the parents are asking me this question, are often committed to public schools for some reason, that children are going to be attended, and they want to know how can we support parents and children who are in the school system, either by choice? Or frankly, some of them don't have a choice? Are there ways that we can support those families?Given what we know about the system? Jen  08:11 In my opinion, of course, first of all, yes, there are many ways that we can help, and it will probably be good to talk to people who are focused on that, because I am not. What I'm focused on is building systems and community, and language and practice. For those who have escaped and for those of us when we can, and also so that we can bring self-directed skills and focal points, things like agency and consent and partnership, so that we can sprinkle that into all the waters and all the places because though everybody can't leave school, self directed education, those skills apply all across the board, their life skills and so my thing is if we can get more exposure and practice around self directed skills, including people who are still opted into or trapped into school, then it's going to make our society, our relationships, our ways of being together, safer and healthier and hopefully, Jen for me, hopefully, we fade school out and what we do instead is a thing that includes a school but doesn't center it and the inclusion of school will be humanized. That's my hope. Yeah, Not reform, not what to do with the people. What none of that. Akilah Richards  09:32 Mm hmm. Yep, I love that vision and you mentioned already about your daughter Miley and that she didn't have time to think her own thoughts and I was so struck with that because I read that in the book. And that was a conversation you'd had with her years ago, and then you released an interview with her. You interviewed her on the podcast not so long ago, and I listened to that and I was so struck by her self-assuredness and her confidence, and the contrast between that and what you said about the fact that she was losing her confidence by being in school. She wasn't asking questions anymore. She was worried that she was asking the wrong questions or just being too tired to ask any questions at all. And so I'm wondering, what implications does this have? this idea that you don't have a chance to think your own thoughts, have for our children's not just learning? but they're being in the world? Akilah Richards  10:24  Yeah, Akilah Richards  10:24 I love that you brought that up. Yet, It was such a stuck point for me. Like I all the time I said, I don't remember a lot of things. Like just like, generally, my memory is just like, wow. But that was that one really stuck out. Because it what it reminds me of is when I watch movies, thankfully, I haven't experienced this in my real life, where somebody is in a coma, like a type of coma where they can hear you, they can see you, but they can't do the things that they would want to do, basic stuff, let alone. You know, like breakdancing, right. So like that, to me, is its own curriculum. It is its own course of study. The fact that it is normal for us to be in an environment where someone explicitly states what we should be doing, not only with our bodies and our time, but with our cognition. What we should be pondering,how we should showcase this pondering? Dude, that's wild. That's normal. To me, it is, listen, the fact that that is normal to me is something that we need to be with. And when Miley said that, it allowed me to reclaim a bit of myself that I could then tap into and free my children. Because for me, the implications of that is that we become really well versed at performing, thinking and performing presence, to the point that it becomes something that we cannot even distinguish for ourselves. The times that we do want to actually be present for something we feel bad or guilty or we can't reconcile that, we have to not do something else that needs to be done in order to address this thing. Because schoolishness says, if you do this from nine to 10, and 10, and 11, and then you take a break here, and then if you finish at three, if you do that, for four years. This is the end result. So then we now learn we become acclimated to that type of dehumanized process, we apply that we attempt repeatedly and fail to apply that to our actual selves, and we also hold other people responsible to that. So there's no like deep research team that need. We see this all the time, we see this in our relationships with each other. Those are the results. Those are the effects of the normalizing of that way of someone else having that level of agency over things. Including how you think, what you think, and what you do with what you think. Jen  13:02 Yeah, when you put it like that, it is absolutely wild and the fact that we can no longer distinguish between what we've been told to think and what we actually think. Jen  13:14 So much of adulthood is like unraveling that, like who am I, outside of the ideas of who I've needed to be, or someone else's ideas of who I should be, or who I am, or who I was, so much of our own. Necessary unraveling is that, and I feel like some of that is maybe unavoidable, right, because we're people raised by other people. So it's not like this whole thing is like, you know, messed up from the beginning. It's the elements of it where we do not have the space to think our own thoughts, that the things that feel like a luxury, we have to have the money to go on a retreat to be with our feelings and thoughts and think about what you know, like Satguru said in this moment, and how does that connect with my body. These things that feel so like, like they're for rich White women, essentially, these are life skills that everybody has, but that there are things in place in our society that puts something in front of that level of self inquiry and exploration, and organic to gathering that I think is very much embedded in school.  Jen  14:20 Yeah, I definitely have seen things that I've learned in the last 18 months. Thinking about body awareness, and awareness of how I process information. And oh my goodness, wait, it's like why is that not the curriculum of schools? Jen  14:36 Exactly, Jen. Like, why wouldn't we know these things? Like even our digestive system?  Jen  14:41 Yes.  Akilah Richards  14:42 Right. Like, we learn about it right quick and we take the test. Boom. I know it. You know, we might Jen  14:46...

In this Sharing Your Parenting Mojo episode we hear from listener Anne, who has been in my Parenting Membership for a year now.  In our conversation we discussed the anxiety she used to feel about every aspect of parenting, including the things she wanted to teach her son to do (Spanish! Coding!) and how she interacted with both him and with her husband.   She actually joined the Parenting Membership to learn how to become the perfect parent, and I'm sorry to say that I failed as her teacher/guide in that regard.  She is not a perfect parent (and neither am I), but she is now a perfectly good enough parent, and has been able to relax into her relationship with her son because of that.   I hope you enjoy this raw, vulnerable conversation where Anne reflects on the changes she has made in her life over the last year.     [accordion] [accordion-item title="Click here to read the full transcript"] Jen  00:03 Hi, I’m Jen and I host the Your Parenting Mojo podcast where I critically examine strategies and tools related to parenting and child development that are grounded in scientific research and principles of respectful parenting. In this series of episodes called Sharing Your Parenting Mojo, we turn the tables and hear from listeners. What have they learned from the show that’s helped their parenting? Where are they still struggling? And what tools can we find in the research that will help? If you’d like to be notified when new episodes are released and get a FREE Guide to 7 Parenting Myths We Can Safely Leave Behind, seven fewer things to worry about, subscribe to the show at YourParentingMojo.com. You can also continue the conversation about the show with other listeners in the Your Parenting Mojo Facebook group. I do hope you’ll join us.   Jen  00:59 Hello, and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. Today we're going to hear from a special guest Anne, who is a parent whom I work with on a regular basis. She's going to tell us about the anxiety that she used to feel to be the perfect parent to her son, which threatened to overwhelm her and potentially even her marriage. She actually joined my membership a couple of years ago hoping it would teach her how to become the perfect parent. And in some ways, she didn't get what she paid for at all. And another she got so much more.   Jen  01:28 Unfortunately, she didn't learn how to become the perfect parent. Instead, she realized there's no such thing as a perfect parent and that trying to be the perfect parent was tearing her apart. She learns new communication tools which we teach as a way of helping parents to get on the same page about the parenting decisions they're making, But of course, they're applicable to other kinds of conversations as well. So now she's able to talk with her husband in a way that doesn't get his back up, that helps him to understand her needs, and she's able to hear and understand his needs, and they can work together to find solutions to all kinds of problems, not just those related to parenting.   Jen  02:02 She's become deeply involved in anti-racist work, and if you join the membership, you'll actually find her leading our anti-racist group activities. When she's learned how to stand up to family members, when they say something that she finds deeply offensive. She used to just be offended and let it slide and be seething on the inside, but she doesn't do that anymore, and she knows how to decide which of these kinds of issues that families disagree on are okay to let go, and which are worth taking a stand on. And she's become increasingly confident over the last few months to take a stand on those things that she knows are important to her. So, she's learning how to set boundaries with people that she's never felt able to set boundaries with before, which is setting a great example for her son who's watching and learning from her.   Jen  02:45 So, in some ways, she's become more rigid where she used to be so flexible that her needs weren't being met. And in other ways, she's become much more flexible, where she used to be very rigid. She doesn't worry anymore about teaching her son coding, or Spanish, or any of the other skills that she wants thought were critical to his success and to her role as a good parent. Instead, she sees her son for who he is, and she's able to meet his needs rather than imposing on him what she used to feel she had to deliver to him in her role as the perfect parent.   Jen  03:17 Anne it's just one of the amazing parents that I've had the honor to work with in my memberships over the last couple of years. Some of them are former perfect parents, other parents who were just about holding it together and have found a similar sense of calm and clarity as they connect with their child's needs and have let all the unimportant stuff go. I'd love to work with you as well, no matter where you are in your parenting journey.   Jen  03:38 To learn more about the memberships go to YourParentingMojo.com/memberships.   Jen  03:44 I'm here today with a listener. Anne. Anne, thanks so much for joining us. It's so great to see you.   Anne  03:48 Hello, good to see you too.   Jen  03:51 So, I wonder if you could tell us maybe a little bit about your family and yourself as well. And, and we're going to talk about kind of a transformation that's happened in your parenting over the last couple of years. So maybe you can just set the stage by telling us a bit about who you are and who you live with.   Anne  04:06 Sure. Yeah. So, my name is Anne. And I have a two-and-a-half-year-old son Anderson. And we live with his father, my husband, Jeff, and let's see. Yeah, I work in STEM and education for university. I really like what I do. That's nice. I have great work life balance. So that's awesome, too. Yeah, we live in Arizona. Flagstaff, Arizona, so it's actually snowing here today.   Jen  04:36 Yes. You're getting all the snow; we're getting all the sun.   Anne  04:40 Yes. Strange weather. Yeah.   Jen  04:43 So, I wonder if you can tell me about some things that are important to you as an individual and, and the values that you really had as you were thinking about having children and starting to raise a child.   Anne  04:55 Right. Yes. So, I actually did quite a bit of thought into this. about two and a half years ready before I had my son. So, I just, yeah, I thought a lot about what kind of world I was bringing him into and what kind of world I wanted to set up for him and what our values might be. So yeah, above all, I believe in just compassion, empathy, equity, respect for all people, including, you know, and that doesn't exclude anyone, even people that exclude other people, for instance. And also, to some degree, just the ecosystem, so the living and nonliving things in our life. And I really, I try to live by that. And I'd like to raise my son to live by that.   Jen  05:46 Yeah. And so, you joined the Finding Your Parenting Mojo membership a couple of years ago, and I wonder if you can tell me a little bit about what was going on in your mind when you made that decision to join? What were you trying to achieve?   Anne  06:00 Oh, yes, good questions. My goals have shifted a little bit. Yeah, at the time, it was my goal, you know, to have my son speak Spanish, and to be versed in coding, and all these things. And I really just wanted to be like the perfect parent. I wanted to, like, give him the stage set for any kind of life that he wanted to live. And that was very exhausting. And yeah, like, not possible, really. So, when I joined, I was really looking to become like a perfect parent. But what it's done is much different than that, right?   Jen  06:40 Yeah, a little bit.   Anne  06:41 It certainly helped me grow as a parent, but it's also helped me shift my perspective as to kind of where I want to put my energy and how to make it effective.   Jen  06:53 Okay.   Anne  06:54 I already...   Jen  06:55 And how did that process start for you?   Anne  06:57 So, it started, I guess, by reading, reading guides, listening to your podcasts, and kind of checking out some ancillary materials, you know, that you have provided. And then also, I think the big leap for me was participating in the membership calls. So, interacting with other people that share the same goals, creating kind of a community. And just seeing the different examples of ways people are doing it, and how they're fitting in and through their lives. It really started to shift things in my life as opposed to just absorbing massive amounts of information.   Jen  07:38 Mm hmm. Yeah, this is a common tendency isn't it? It's when we feel like something isn't right, that we it's just we haven't read the right book yet. We just need more information.   Anne  07:49 Right? Yeah. I read a lot of books. Changed a lot what I was doing   Jen  07:57 Yeah. And so, what do you think might have happened if you've gone down that path that you were on? Where do you think that would have taken you as a parent? And then your relationship with your son?   Anne  08:08 Good question. I did reach a tipping point, kind of with my exhaustion. And yeah, just reached a level of anxiety that was alarming. And we all realized as a family, oh, wait, we need to change something here. This isn't working. So yeah, I was just very kind of overwhelmed and filled with anxiety, mostly. And I wonder, you know, if that tipping point hadn't have happened, and they just kind of kept chugging along on that path, you know, I think some possible outcomes could have been parental burnout, work, life burnout, potentially even divorce. Hopefully not. But you know, those things that, you know, tend to happen when you just kind of keep chugging along in a fear based, anxious state. I'm happy to be off that track.   Jen  09:03 Oh, wow. Okay, so I wonder then, if you can tell us a bit about how this transformation happened between that place where you were, that was very fear and anxiety based to what seems like a very different path. What was the beginning? Like?   Anne  09:18 Yeah, so I mean, like, with all transformative change, it came from multiple directions, right? You know, there was some of the different topics we covered in the membership group like parenting as a team - pairing with your partner - you know, that kind of broadened in the marriage aspect, like how can I improve my relationship to improve my parenting. And then goal setting and reducing anxiety, self-compassion, you know, all these things that these ideas that I hadn't really been introduced to in any sort of helpful way before. So, you know, it starts with the idea and then just trying to incorporate it, like, okay, here's a situation where I recognize this is what's happening, how can I actually incorporate what I'm learning about, and hearing about, and talking about with other people into this? How can I bring that into this situation? So, it's been like, kind of a practice.   Anne  10:20 And yeah, like talking about things that have, here's a situation that happened in the past, and I anticipate it's going to happen again, like, bringing up those examples and talking through, Well, how could I have done this better? or What can I do next time. So it is, the difference is bringing it into your personal life as a practice. And being able to talk with you, being able to talk with other parents on this journey about what they might do in your specific situation really makes the difference, I think.   Jen  10:56 Yeah, and I've been impressed in the times that we've interacted on our group calls, you lay yourself out there, and you get kind of vulnerable. And it's, it's not required, there are some people who will, will definitely kind of hold things back. And they're looking for a situation or a solution to a certain situation. But you will kind of say, you know, this is what's going on for me right now. And it's hard. And I think that that really allows us to get below the surface level, "Oh, well, my child's misbehaving, what do I do?" to what's really underneath this and how do we work on that stuff? Because that's, I mean, that's the stuff of life, right? That's the  really important stuff.   Anne  11:34 Yeah, no, I mean, being vulnerable is extremely important to grow. And, yeah, every time that I have been vulnerable on these calls, and our groups and everything like that, it's helped me get out of that. Whatever, undesirable situation, I'm in that I may not want to share it because I'm embarrassed, I'm able to actually move through it, and then it's no longer an issue. So, I don't even have to be embarrassed about it anymore because it's not there anymore. So yeah, I think it's really important. And it does, it helps to have the community that you know, will be supportive to be able to bring that, those things up.   Jen  12:20 Hmm. I wonder if you can talk us through a specific challenge that you've had, and something that maybe it just, just seemed like, there wasn't a way out of this paper bag and then how that shifted for you. Is there is an example that pops to mind?   Anne  12:36 Yes, I mean, there's a lot of... There's so many things that I worked through after, you know, a lifetime of really not addressing them this year. So, yeah, I think one really surprising thing out of this, you know, improve my parenting goal which I'm a part of here is that it's actually helped me address some things in my relationship with my mother which has always been very complicated. We just have gone through several periods of, you know, not getting along to kind of tolerating each other, and then going back into the not getting along.   Anne  13:15 And so, one of the things that I was able to do in the membership just through kind of these interactions with the community, is kind of stand up to her about some non-inclusive political beliefs that she was just spouting. And, you know, I've never really stood up to my mother for myself, I've always just kind of changed the subject or walked away, or, you know, just sit there, and listen with a scowl on my face or something like that. And so, kind of when we were talking about this, like how to raise anti-racist children how to be less racist, more anti-racist yourself, then I was thinking, you know, I do I need to stand up to her about this thing.   Anne  14:06 And so, she said something that I didn't agree with. It was about like blue versus pink diapers or something. And I was just, you know, and I found it offensive. And I was like, "I'm upset that you said that." And that's all it took. I didn't have to elaborate. I didn't have to try to present any data, any argument, you know, like, nothing. That's all it took. And she's basically like, I'd never stood up to my mother about anything. So that gave me the confidence to stand up to her about stuff that mattered to me and my relationship with her, in my relation, in my son's relationship with her. And since I've kind of been able to address some of these things head on as they come up, and be like, "Hey, I don't want you to treat my son that way. Or I don't want you to treat me that way. That's not fair." And to her credit, she's been super responsive and very apologetic. And so, it's a two-way street, right? But if you never stand up for yourself, then you never would know, right? And you'd never have the opportunity to improve the situation. So, our relationship, my relationship with my mother has improved, as well as my son's relationship with his grandmother.   Jen  15:23 Yeah, I didn't know you're going to bring up this example, but I remember that you recently visited with her, right? And had a kind of a breakthrough in that relationship. Would you mind speaking about that?   Anne  15:36 Yeah, so we visited for three weeks, because you know, COVID world and like, if you're going to travel, I'm working from home anyways. So where does it matter where I am. So, so we visited for three weeks, that's just an extremely long amount of time. And at one point, we were packing, I'm packing for a weekend with my husband and my son, we're going to take their camper and kind of get away from the vacation for a vacation from a vacation. And my son wanted to pack some blocks that my mother had bought him to play with. Well, she kind of has her own thing about toys, and you know, what's hers and things mean a lot to her. And I was totally triggered because I was like, "You!" You know, in my in my inner child head I'm like, "You never let me play with the toys I wanted to play with." And, you know, "You always controlled the way I played with them." And now that you're telling my son, my two-year-old son that he can't take these blocks that you bought them, like, I'm super triggered. So, I just, you know, I threw an adult tantrum, and I was just throwing them blocks in the bag. And then later, when she, we kind of came together to reconcile and apologize, I was like, "You know, what I was triggered, I was triggered because of trauma from childhood that I had around toys. And that you, you know, you wouldn't let me play with toys the way I wanted to, you wouldn't let me play with certain toys. They always had to be, how you saw them, and which toys and it was just very controlling." And so, she was basically like, "Wow, okay, I'm really sorry, I did that." And then fast forward three days, she was like, "I remember doing this to you. I remember that American Girl doll that you wanted. Not getting it for you. Buying you a porcelain doll that you weren't allowed to play with. I remember these things. And I'm sorry, I'm really sorry."   Jen  17:40 Wow, first time I'm hearing all the details is giving me the shivers.   Anne  17:42 And so, no, it was really... And through that process she was kind of able to remember some good things about that. Like, because I wasn't allowed to play with toys, I just went outside. So, I've had, I have a lifelong love of the outdoors. So, I mean, that's not too bad. And you know, it's kind of, Yeah, it's just and how could my mother have known how that would affect me? You know, like, she don't know what you don't know. And she has her childhood stuff about toys. And so, I was able to forgive her completely.   Jen  18:19 How did that feel?   Anne  18:20 Amazing. Like, I don't even mind talking to her on the phone now. Like it's awesome.